Puzzle and News

Well, I'm now booked to play in two Open tournaments: Reykjavik in Iceland towards the end of February and Bangkok in Thailand in April! It's great as I've never been to Iceland. And even though I've been to Thailand 3 years ago, I am also really looking forward to it because it will be a lot hotter than wintry England! IM Simon Ansell is also going and we will stay for a few extra days in each country to look around and explore.

I played a game on Tuesday for the 2nd Hackney team in the London League. I was actually playing on the first board, which is quite unusual for a woman! But I lost... I thought I was doing quite well, I played as white against the Queen's Indian for the first time. I seemed to get a good position out of the opening despite not knowing almost any theory on this opening. However, I blundered a pawn in the time-trouble and it was the end of it, especially since my opponent was playing quite fast and had a lot more time. He didn't have ECF rating, but his FIDE converted to ECF was about 193, so quite strong for me. The match is still on-going as one game was adjourned (yes! adjournments still happen in England!!!) with an extra pawn in the rook ending on my team's side. If we win that game we would draw the match, so it's a very important game. However, rook endings are notoriously hard to win.

This weekend I'm playing in a local London tournament in Barnet, not FIDE-rated. I thought I might as well get some practice since Barnet is fairly close to where I live. I will play two games on each of two days, so it's quite intense but good practice for clock handling before more serious Uxbridge all-play-all tournament in mid-February. And on Monday I'll be playing in the London League again, this time for the 1st Hackney team.

Here is a fairly simple puzzle for you from one of my games in Hastings, black to move. Can you find the winning continuation? Let me know if you can and I will post the solution in a couple of weeks.

G. Moore (1902) - M. Yurenok (1968)

3 January 2010, Hastings

Finally, I've had a training session with my new GM coach Chris Ward on Tuesday and it went well. I will be an expert in 1.d4 openings in no time, so watch out!!

Chess and Fitness

As expected, Stereophonics were great on Monday. It was a bit of a strange gig because half of the songs were very old and the other half were from their new album due to come out in a couple of months. It's always a bit harder to get into it if you've never heard the songs before as you can't sing along! All it means is that I'll have to buy the new album, learn the songs and go to their gig again :) I'm sure they'll do a few gigs after release of their album. And my Green Day tickets came through the post today - that'll be the next gig I go to.

Most chess players would agree that keeping fit is important to their success. I think that the old saying "healthy body equals healthy mind" is quite appropriate for chess players. I don't really do any sports apart from going to the gym. I never used to like it as I always thought it's quite boring, but in absence of any better ideas I started going to the gym quite regularly from last year. In fact, I found that competing against myself was a good motivator. What that means is that with every session I tried to increase weights and go faster on cardio machines. So I really enjoyed the gym to start with because it was easy to make a lot of progress at the beginning. But now I don't seem to be able to up the game against myself and I'm really finding the gym a hard work. Loss of motivation made me rather lazy and I hardly went to the gym over the summer. It didn't help that the gym's air conditioning didn't seem to make much difference in the hot weather! Well, with that kind of attendance - no surprise I'm not making any progress. I've started going regularly again, and hope to step it up a notch during my sabbatical. Starting a day in the gym definitely improves my energy levels.

It's only one week before I fly to play chess in Switzerland. In these last few days my main learning focus will be tactics. However, yesterday I spent a while listening to several lectures on the ICC. Every week I try to listen to the "Game of The Week" by GM Joel Benjamin and "Attack with Larry C" by GM Larry Christiansen. I highly recommend those. I've also prepared some new opening lines for the Uxbridge Congress, but no one played those against me! Typical! Well, I have one more chess game to play before I go to Switzerland. And if one of my new lines doesn't come up again, then I'll just have to practice on the ICC. That game will be on Monday for the Hackney club in the London league. It's the first game of the season and it will be against the Richmond club. If any of my team-mates are reading - good luck to all of them!

Uxbridge Congress

It's been quiet on my blog, because I've been playing in the Uxbridge Congress Open for the last 3 days. It was very well organised and I would recommend it to anyone. I guess I also enjoyed myself because I did quite well: 3 out of 5 with 2139 FIDE rating performance and without losing any games. Plus I gained 16 rating points :) I'm especially happy that I managed to do well despite rather fast time limit for my liking: 1:30hr for the whole game plus 30 second increment after each move. It seems that playing in the rapidplay last week definitely helped me to manage my time in this tournament. Here is a photo of me taken by Sean Hewitt - the tournament organiser:

Apart from the first round which I won, all my opponents were 150-200 rating points higher than me and I drew against them all! Unfortunately, I was unable to convert my pawn advantage in two of them. In round one (Friday evening) I was relieved to win against a little boy. Those juniors can be quite dangerous and significantly under-rated. In fact, later in the tournament he performed 200 points higher than his current rating. In round two (Saturday morning) I just couldn't win in the rook ending with a pawn up. It must have been winning, but it's so hard to find the right moves playing on the increment! In the afternoon I had a headache and was tired. I was white and managed to lead a straightforward game which suited the way I felt. It was the most boring game of the whole tournament, but then I was glad to finish it in under two hours and have a couple of hours sleep before dinner.

The next day I was losing my morning game with black. My opponent played a move I haven't come across in the Slav, so that got me thinking. Later I lost a pawn in the middlegame, but managed to convert it into a rook ending which I believe was also lost. I was two pawns down at some point, but somehow managed to draw while playing on the increment. My hands were shaking for a while after the game finished - all that nervous energy and excitement had to go somewhere, right?

In the afternoon I was a bit concerned my brain wasn't working as clearly as I wanted to, because I started catching myself on missing simple tactics. So I offered a draw in what I thought was a better position for me. However, my opponent declined. But a couple of moves later he gave up a bishop for a knight and then he lost a pawn. Now I was playing for a win! Unexpectedly, my opponent turned out to have some strange compensation and the draw was agreed a few moves later. I must have misplayed it somewhere, so need to analyse the game.

This tournament once again showed that I need to learn to convert my advantage. Hmm, this subject is almost as wide as trying to learn the meaning of the universe. Here you can see the Uxbridge Congress tournament table. By the way, Golders Green Rapidplay tournament table has also just been published and my performance was 168 ECF - about what I expected. No time to rest for me, as I'm going to the Stereophonics gig tomorrow evening after work!! Looks like Tuesday evening will be taken up by sleeping to recover from all that chess and music.