In yesterday's post, I focused my exposition on a number of related things: I discussed IM Josh Waitzkin's advice that we should allow chess to be an extension of our personalities, and about how the great GM Mikhail Tal's explosive style made him (a)phenomenal and (b)unable to fit a Karpovian mold. Although seemingly unrelated, what I'm about to share ties back in...a little.
But first, I'll throw in a little personal back story.
First and foremost, let me begin by saying this: I am not Mikhail Tal. I'm obviously not the man himself, but speaking in generalities, I have almost none of his chess prowess and am, at best, a chess amateur. If we use Waitzkin's chess/personality theory, I'm also not like him in any of my mannerisms: The chess I play is simplistic and calculated; I'm pretty sure I've never handed my pieces to the opposition with an understanding that, 50 moves from now, I'm gonna do something amazing. What can I say? I'm a boring guy, and in turn I play a boring style of chess.
Of late, I've also strayed away from my "chess beginnings" (on this site, especially) by embracing turn-based chess and moving past live chess. There's something that consumed me about the freedom to think without restrictions - the freedom to analyze move variations using an actual board, and to take notes about the caveats I find in those positions. If you look at my live chess record, it's been stagnant to say the very least and for the most part, I've been happy with that. But sometimes, when I'm bored at work, I need something to keep me occupied when my opponents are enjoying their 14 day move analyses.
So yesterday, I played live chess.
I mixed it up a bit: I played some bullet and some blitz (ironically, no long games) and I was doing fairly decently overall. So I started the game you see here, and continued (albeit briefly) my success.
Now here's the wtf?! moment of this whole thing. First of all, why would anyone make that move and secondly, why would the person responsible for that fiasco be at all capable of tying himself to the phenomenal Mikhail Tal?
Well you see, the first part of that question can be answered with a vast array of excuses and blames that really boil down to personal idiocy. In my own defense, I'll point out that I was playing at work and that someone came in with a tech grievance so I wasn't able to concentrate on his move at all. When I turned back to the board, instead of looking at what his move was, I focused on the time crunch: I simply noticed that the g2 square was open for attack and since that's the one I'd been eyeballing, I went for it blindly. What can I say? Bad decision. And as for the second part of the question - the answer hasn't come up yet. You see, this part of my game obviously wasn't at all Tal-ian but what came out of it may have been my closest brushes with such an explosive style of play.
You see, at this point, I was ready to hang it up. I almost resigned then and there. But I figured what the hell? I'm stuck at work, bored, and the worst that can happen is I lose; if I resign, that's the best that can happen. So why not finish it out? With that in mind, I continued on. But my game - the way I approached my moves - all of that was changed.
In
Fight Club, Tyler Durden says that
losing all hope is freedom and he's right: I had no hope of winning, and so with that in mind I was free to play an aggressive style of chess that I'm usually too reserved (read: "afraid"
) to play. And that's how the second half of this game works out....
Now I'm not nearly arrogant enough to say Oh, I did that on purpose or Yea: That was my plan the whole time. It was a terrible blunder. I can't even say that wonderful, imaginative play is what saved me: There are instances in there where I can find dozens of better variations for white - moves that probably would have won him the game. So the truth is this: I blundered but he blundered harder. Tartakover said it best: The winner of the game is the player who makes the next-to-last mistake.