With my win in round 1, I was "lucky" enough to be paired with player rated 1820 in round 2. He is a chess coach out of Brownsville. It wasn't too pretty. Of course, my sloppy play didn't help much either - nor did the fact that he set the clock for 1 hour 20 minutes (thinking he had set it for 120 minutes). About a half hour in the game, when I noticed I only had 53 minutes left to play, we stopped the game and sorted out the clock issues.
Anyway ... here's the ugly game. I played the white pieces ...
In the post-mortem, he was at least gracious enough to give me a few tips. But his comments made me chuckle ... after going over the first 8 moves or so, he said flat out the game was over for me.
After that, two of his students were sitting around, so we played a bit of blitz - I was smoked easily.
Hello. You shouldn't be too impressed : 1800 players don't drop pieces and know how to activate their play, and that's it. If you do the same, there's no reason you can't play on par with them.
ReplyDeleteYour b3?! move looks like you were stuck for a plan. The normal one in this structure would be to play Ne5 and try to engineer some kingside play. I don't think the e4 push can work because then cxd4 cxd4 gives him tons of play on the queenside where he is obviously better positioned than you.