Last Friday saw the inaugural round of the new Cork Chess Club Ladder tournament. This is designed to give the option of a serious game instead of blitz at the weekly club nights. It was a good start to the tournament with 5 matches being played. Hopefully this can increase over time.
I hope it continues as I think these long games are much more beneficial to my chess in the long run than blitz. This is for a number of reasons - you can analyse these games whereas blitz is just throwaway really. You learn about time management and can develop a proper thought process for your games. The pressure of playing a long game is far different and the only way to get used to it is practice. So this should prove useful for dealing with Munster League and Club Championship games.
But even if this didn't improve my chess one iota, it's still much more enjoyable to play these games than 10 or so blitz games in the same time period. You get much more invested in the game and are able to properly plan moves rather than playing random stuff with two second increments.
Unfortunately these games cannot be rated as the ICU doesn't have the software to handle this format. This is a pity really and hopefully something can be sorted out in future.
As for my game, I got off to a winning start. I thought it was all going smoothly and then my opponent threw in f5 and g5 and it all took off from there.
→ posted on November 7, 2016chess