Improve your rating- week of 4/20/09
Submitted by
on Sun, 04/26/2009 at 7:12am.
First of all, I'd like to say sorry for being this late, I was loaded with things this week (i.e. notes, debates, chess tournaments, etc.) Anyways, this week's topic is on my lessons from learned from the Queen City Classic on 4/18.
The Queen City Classic is an annual tournament held at Paul Brown Stadium in Cincinnati. It's for youth aged kindergarten- college, and it draws about 600 kids. I played in the K-12 open section, and tied for 8th out of the 600 with my result, so I was very pleased.
Anyways, here are the 5 lessons I learned:
1. Make sure your pieces always have safe squares to retreat to.
In my first game, I brought my knight out to an attacking position, but foolishly placed pieces on its escape squares. This led to a quiet pawn move attacking the kinght, which had no safe squares to go to. I lost the piece and eventually the game.
2. A rook on the 7th rank is extremely valuable.
In the second game, I chose to exchange both rooks for a superior knight vs. bad bishop ending. However, my opponents king was able to guard the pawns, at it ended up as a draw. Looking back, by just exchanging 1 rook and leaving the other one of the 7th rank, I would have had a sure win.
3. Never underestimate your opponent.
In my 3rd game, I played a girl who was rated 368. Yes, that's not a typo, 368. I know kindergarteners with ratings twice as high. I was rated about 1000 points higher, but she did quite well. It was obvious she didn't know what she was doing, but she didn't blunder either. She quietly kept her pieces on the pack 3 ranks, and waited. Eventually I grabbed a pawn, made a trap, and won at move 26. Still, not bad for a 368!
4. Never get too excited and overlook your opponent's move.
In my fourth game, I spent about 10 moves slowly trapping his rook until I advanced my pawn, winning it. My opponent then made some apparently made a useless pawn move, which I overlooked, taking his rook. Then he responded my moving his qeen where the pawn just was and forking my king and rook. At that point, he was winning, but in time trouble, he blundered and lost.
5. If you're not familiar with an opening, try to transpose it to a more familiar one.
In my fifth and final game, my game went like this: 1. d4 d5 2. c4 e6 3. Bf4?! This turned out to be a fairly poor move, only seen in a few games. I had never seen this opening, so I tried to transpose it into the more familiar Tarrasch Defense to the Q.G.D. It wasn't picture-perfect, but it worked well enough and I eventually won the game.
I hope you enjoyed the tips and learned something today. Try to incorporate them into your own games, and hopefully you will see improvement. I will post the full games from the tournament later.
And as usual, a plug for my group, Free Chess Help. (http://www.chess.com/groups/home/free-chess-help)
Free Chess Help was created to help mentor under-1400 players, with a few 2000+ players to help teach. Please join!
See you next week!
-Wicksta85