Reykjavik Tournament

I'm finally back in England and glad to be back! I enjoyed Iceland - it's definitely worth seeing, though it might be a bit more enjoyable in the summer as it wouldn't be so cold. After the tournament finished Simon and I hired a car for a couple of days and saw some amazing scenery, hot geysers and the Blue Lagoon. Just look at this waterfall called Skogafoss!

The Blue Lagoon is an open-air swimming pool with unnaturally light blue water because of all the minerals. While your head is in the open air of about 0 degrees Celsius with nasty wind blowing from every direction, the water is a very pleasant 38 degrees Celsius. We spent about 2 hours in there and it was very relaxing. Here is another waterfall called Gullfoss - do you think I look a bit cold?? Not only it was cold, there were a lot of cold water droplets blowing from the waterfall.

So how about chess? I didn't do very well again. I got my usual 3.5 out of 9 and lost lots of rating again - about 13 points. Here is the official tournament site if you'd like to have a look: Reykjavik Open. I found this tournament pretty hard going maybe because I've overdone on chess a bit lately. Since I played at Uxbridge and at the 4NCL it means I had almost no breaks from playing chess since 13th February. I don't know how professionals do it, perhaps I need to get fitter physically! It's very hard mentally as well if you don't get the results you think you should. Bearing all that in mind, I've decided to have a break from tournaments for a month and train instead. My next tournament will be in Thailand in April and until then I'd just be playing occasional league games. I didn't even have any interesting games worth showing, so instead I'll dig into my games archive from the past few months and show you something interesting from there in the coming posts. I was also a bit disappointed that no one played the King's Indian or Nimzo-Indian against me! I really need to practice those openings. Anyway, here I am at the Reykjavik tournament.

The tournament itself was very well organised and the venue was very pleasant. We even went to the chess quiz and blitz in the evenings. Our team of four English players did pretty well at the quiz despite being half an hour late! And the blitz - well, don't mention the blitz! I'm terrible at it so I'll see you on the ICC and Playchess trying to improve!

This week should be pretty good as it will be my birthday and I have a couple of celebrations planned with my friends. I also have a sweet tooth so very looking forward to yummy desserts and cakes!

Uxbridge All-Play-All

Hello everyone! It's been a busy few days for me. I finished playing at Uxbridge on the 17th February, then played at the 4NCL over the weekend and now I'm in Reykjavik, Iceland - ready to start another tournament tomorrow! Here I am playing my second game at Uxbridge, photo taken by the organiser Sean Hewitt.

I had a disastrous start to my tournament in Uxbridge - I lost 4 games in the row! I was feeling very down at that point. However I managed to follow that up with 3 wins, one of which was against the overall tournament winner Mark Josse. I outplayed him in the endgame and was the only one who beat him. Disappointingly, I lost the final game against the chess player who got the second place even though I was two pawns up at some point. You can see the final tournament table here. The strange thing is I felt as if I'm definitely playing better chess than a few months ago but I seemed to be smudging my finishes in most games that I lost. Another interesting thing is I seem to be playing more aggressive chess which is quite entertaining and complicated at the same time. Sadly I still keep losing rating points - another 10 this time. Of course, there's not much point worrying about rating right now - I just need to improve my chess.

I did much better at the 4NCL. I got 1.5 out of 2 including a win against 2115 FIDE in the nice style. Time limit at the 4NCL was much longer than at Uxbridge, so I guess I had enough time to find a way to covert my advantage. Here I am at the start of the game that I won at the 4NCL. I look quite mean - I was indeed playing for a win!

Unfortunately, my team Betsson.com lost that match 3.5:4.5. It was a very important match for us. Even though we won the second match of the weekend it will now be very difficult for us to get into the top half of the draw. In the next round (held towards the end of March) we have to win 5.5:2.5 against the strong team Wood Green Hilsmark Kingfisher 2 in order to get into the top half. It may turn out to be a very interesting encounter because if we win then our opponents will not get into the top half, so everything will be at stake for both teams.

The weather in Reykjavik is not much colder than in London, but the wind makes it 10 times worse! Even though it was sunny today, I was freezing only after a few minutes outside and had to hop into several shops and coffee bars to keep myself warm while walking around. Here is an unusual church in the centre of Reykjavik.

But the birds don't seem to mind the wind and the mostly frozen lake. This is near the playing venue - City Hall.

I still haven't got the draw for the first round but you'll be able to find it here together with the tournament results. I'll give you my update in a few days.

How Do You Evaluate a Position?

First of all, I have some exciting news. My friends at http://www.gingergm.com/ have created and posted a video from the London Chess Classic tournament held back in December. There are several interviews with grandmasters including Vladimir Kramnik! You will also notice a few shots of me in action :) So please do check out the video and let me know what you thought of it: http://www.gingergm.com/2010/02/10/interviews-at-the-london-chess-classic/

Tomorrow is the start of my all-play-all Challengers tournament at Uxbridge (near London). You can see the list of my opponents in the table here: http://www.e2e4.org.uk/international/2010/Uxbridge/group_fischer.htm
The tournament is quite intense with one round tomorrow and two rounds for the following 4 days. Yes, I'll be working hard during the Saint Valentine's Day. But I wish you a very happy Valentine's Day filled with lots of love! I'll update you on my tournament result towards the end of next week.

In the last post I published a puzzle (Yurenok- Peat). It was very easy and I'm sure all of you found the solution. My opponent resigned after: 21.Nxg6 because after 21...hxg6 22.Qxg6+ he either loses his queen 22...Bg7 23.Qxd6 or gets checkmated 22...Kh8 23.Rh3+ He could have moved his rook with 21...Rf7 but I guess he didn't fancy playing with two pawns down in a totally lost position!

I was asked the other day to describe how I evaluate a position. I'm sure you'd agree it's quite a complicated topic to discuss. I would be very interested to hear from you - my blog readers - how you would answer this question. My guess is there are as many answers to this question as there are chess players in the world!

During a game I don't systematically evaluate every weakness vs. every strength to come to a final evaluation. I do it more subconsciously than that, but if I was to "break down" my subconsciousness it would include all the things I know about what's good (e.g. bishop pair, etc) and what's bad (e.g. lack of space, etc) and my overall level of experience of the position in question. Some books suggest very detailed approach for position evaluation but I've never heard any decent chess players going through a tick list in their head!

My evaluations probably tend to range from "winning", to "better", to "about equal", to "complicated", to "difficult" to "lost". On top of that I consider my time spending situation and try to assess my chances realistically from that perspective. I'm also an optimist by nature so have a tendency to overestimate my chances sometimes. It's not that easy to cure this problem, but I'm trying. One of my friends IM Adam Hunt has given a good advice which went along the lines of: don't assess a position as "winning" or "losing", but rather assess as "white has better chances" or "black has better chances". His view is that is how top players evaluate positions if you listen to their after-game analysis. I think this advice certainly has some psychological value as it's much harder to re-adjust during a game if you thought you were winning earlier but didn't at the end, however it's not such a big psychological loss if you thought you only had better chances! Another related point is also in the wording - it's important to notice opponent's "chances" - something that I don't always pay enough attention to. Well, enough for now! Maybe with your help we can start a bit of a discussion on this topic.

Hastings Tournament

Happy New Year everyone! It's been very quiet on my blog for a while because I've been playing in Hastings - the oldest chess tournament in the world. The current venue is a large sports centre, that's why you can see basketball rings on the photograph below.

I wasn't able to play the first game and had an average performance in the rest of the tournament gaining 2.5 points out of 8 rounds and losing 10 rating points. However, I had some interesting games and will present those to you in a few days time. The tournament was won by four GMs on 7 points: Howell, Hebden (both English), Edouard (French) and Istratescu (Romanian). Here are the two of the four winners playing each other in round five: Howell - Istratescu ended in a win for Istratescu.

Hastings is a pleasant sea side resort in the summer, but in the winter the weather is quite miserable. There was a lot of heavy rain in the first few days and it turned into snow towards the end of the tournament. When it snows in England you can be sure that public transport stops normal operations. I guess many foreign chess players had trouble travelling back home because several airports were closed and trains were operating reduced service. There is still snow in England which has turned into dangerous ice on many footpaths and roads. This is set to continue for the coming days, creating the longest freeze in England for almost 30 years and causing all sorts of chaos across the country. I did go out for a walk around Hastings on one of the rare sunny days, however it didn't help me with my chess! Here are the ruins of the ancient Hastings Castle.

I was late for my first game (which for me was in the second round) by 20 minutes because I got lost trying to get to the venue despite leaving the hotel 15 minutes before the game. I've been to the Hastings tournament before, I think in 2001, but back then I had a car and getting around was very straightforward. This time I had to use my feet and my very wet and quickly disintegrating map in the cold Hastings rain. The streets in the centre of Hastings are quite complicated and many of them don't have signs, making it difficult to figure out where you are at any point in time. Even some Hastings residents couldn't point me in the right direction! Needless to say that Hastings is not the kind of place where you can easily flag a passing taxi. I was getting very worried, because default time was 30 minutes. Eventually someone helped me with the right directions and I arrived to my game red-faced and out of breath from all that quick walking. I eventually lost my game. Here I am once I'd calmed down a bit, seemingly not having it as tough as the chess player next to me - Petr Marusenko.

In the evening before the last round I participated in a themed blitz tournament, which was a part of The Killer Dutch DVD launch party. The DVD is presented by the very talented English GM Simon Williams who's been playing the Classical Dutch all his life. He has a very engaging presentation style and I thoroughly recommend for anyone to buy it. I've bought one! You can find more information about the DVD and how to buy it on Simon's website: http://www.gingergm.com/ The great thing about the blitz was that every game had to start with the moves 1.d4 f5 even if you've never played those moves before in your life! There were lots of fun Dutch-themed prizes like cheese and Advocaat liqueur. Even I got a prize for being the top woman in the blitz despite getting only 2.5 points. That reminds me that I should go and taste my prize, because I got some lovely Dutch peach schnapps! :) The winner of the blitz was GM Danny Gormally, but not before the play-off against my coach and good friend IM Simon Ansell. Here is a photo of their first play-off game.

Since my tournament chess isn't going as well as I was hoping, I've decided not to go to Moscow or Gibraltar in February and train instead. My next tournament will be in mid-February and local to London. It's a bit less serious than my recent Opens, but it's still an all-play-all and FIDE-rated Uxbridge International. I will be playing in the "Challengers" section against 9 players of roughly the same strength as myself. And if all goes well I may go to the Reykjavik Open at the end of February. I've never been to Iceland and fancy checking it out!