Round 6 Fall 2006 OCL

I'm satisfied with my effort in this game. What I'm not too happy about is my time management. After not using enough time the last few games, I decided to use as much time analyzing what I deemd were critical positions. The problem, however, is that I thought all my positions were critical and I ended up using too much time.

I used to think that 45 45 and 60 15 were too long. Now I think they are too quick. Had this game been 90 15 or something like that, I think I would have won. But towards the end of the game when I needed to use more time to analyze, I didn't have enough minutes on the clock to allow myself that comfort. Subsequently I missed a sweet tactic that Fritz pointed out. Up to that point, my game was pretty good. But as Mr. Heisman says, "you game is only as good was your worst move."

Here is the tactic I missed.


Again, because of time constraints, I didn't analyze all the checks, captures and threats. One of the candidate moves was indeed Nf5. But since I was rushing (and it was late at night so I was mentally tired) I didn't fully follow through on this line. I saw that I would hang my H rook and then failed to see that my D rook would win a queen if I moved Ne7+ (assuming he didn't move his king).

There is only one more round left in the Fall OCL. About Tal is dead last.

I've organized my studies a bit. I'm continuing to work on the tactics, but I'm not going to focus on them exclusively. I'm going to keep working on them for about 30-40 minutes a night. After tactics, I'll be reading through some games. I still need to finish Logical Chess Move by Move Every Moved Explained by Chernev. So I'm reading that book every night until I finish it. I've got all the games on pgn so I have the games in front of me as I read.

Also, I've been reading several Knight Errant posts & comments about positional play (especially Tempo's posts). You read read them here, here & here. I've also been reading Dan Heisman's Chess Cafe article entitled "A Positional Primer" from September 2002. Interesting stuff.

Lastly, after the Fall OCL, I don't think there will be any (on-line) tournaments for a while. I plan on trying to find one long game a week to keep up that end of the chess front. So if anyone wants to play some long games between November 12th and December 17th , post a comment and we can arrange a game. I play on FICS.