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    Cork Club Championship Round 4

    I played my fourth round in the Club Championship and won. I thought I was doing fine and then my opponent sacrificed a knight for a couple of central pawns and an open f-file. The computer would have been fine in this position but I wasn't! The tactical complications were too much.

    I played a bad move and after e5 I spent ages trying to find a good response and failed. All I could see was diagonals opening up for his queen and bishop to complement his open file. So I sacrificed a piece back and got the queens off and started over again. I was able to win from when my opponent later dropped a piece.

    That's after bringing me back to 50% in the tournament. I'm still down a few rating points but they won't be taken into account until the tournament completes so I have time to try to win them back.

    posted on February 24, 2017chess


    Munster League Division 1. Rounds 8 and 9.

    Rounds 8 and 9 of the Munster League took place on the 5th February and the B team had a tough assignment playing Ennis A home and away. We lost boths rounds heavily - 1.5-3.5 and 1-4.

    I drew my first game with black. It was a Rubenstein French which ended up in a R+Kn vs R+Kn endgame which we drew by repetition. My opponent at one stage around move 21 had a potential sacrifice of his knight on f7. Even in the analysis afterwards we weren't too sure if it worked out. One interesting thing is that my opponent spent a lot of time trying to calculate this sacrifice. I had a similar experience in the last round of the Mulcahy where my opponent spent a lot of time trying to calculate a potential attack. My new strategy is to get into a position where there is a just plausible enough attack against me so my opponents burn lots of time on their clocks and I end up with a time advantage!

    The second game was a complete disaster. I had sucessfully navigated my opponents attack and just needed a couple more accurate moves - h4 and knight somewhere - and we would havea level position. Instead I didn't realise my pawn was pinned and moved my knight to where it could be taken for nothing. What an absolute disaster. We have important games coming up against Limerick so I need to be a lot sharper for those.

    posted on February 5, 2017chess


    Cork Club Championship Round 3

    I played my third round in the Club Championship and lost. I think I was ok for most of the game but then lost the plot near the end. I didn't have a clear idea of what I was supposed to be doing during most of the game. I think I should have brought my rooks over to the queenside early and pushed there.

    posted on January 27, 2017chess


    Cork Club Ladder Round 3

    I came agonizingly close to winning my third round game in the Cork Club Ladder. I had a winning position (+2.5 on the computer) at the end at move 36 and my opponent was running really short on time. I just needed to make one accurate move to bring out my knight instead of my bishop. Unfortunately I brought out the bishop first and let his rook in and lost from there.

    posted on January 19, 2017chess


    Mulcahy 2017

    The Mulcahy 2017 tournament was held last weekend from the 6th to 8th January at the Metropole Hotel here in Cork. There was a large entry and I think it's fair to say it was a big success and great credit must go to Pat Twomey for organizing this. You can read his report on the ICU website. I enjoy playing in this tournament as the rooms we're in are nice and compact - it creates a good atmosphere.

    They place a particular emphasis on having young people play - they give a medal for junior players under 16. Which sounds grand until you start getting beaten by them! What about us adult cannon fodder Pat. Where's our medals!

    I didn't have a great tournament - I finished with 50% but lost rating points. I've put my games from the tournament up here - I had a travelling bye in the first round. My results were all over the place. I won a game where my opponent missed a tactic to win my bishop. I lost a game I possibly could have drawn and also lost a game where I was better at one stage. It all evens out I suppose.

    I had two engrossing endgames on the last day. I won the first one but lost in my last game of the tournament. It's really dispiriting to do it that way around as I walked away on a loss. If I'd lost the first game but won the second, I'd have felt not too bad as I would have retrieved something from the day.

    I'm trying to compare it to my first entry in this tournament two years ago to see if I've made any progress in the intervening two years. Going on results, I'd be hard pressed to say so! I did have a better idea of what I was doing in the games - especially with black - but this time I made a few more blunders. The previous occasion I was able to draw a few more games. I wonder if playing with a rating affected me - last time I was unrated so I didn't have any expectations before the games of what the result should be. I'll have another chance to compare progress in a couple of months at the Cork Congress. I had bad tournament last time dropping over 100 points so surely I can't do as bad again!

    The overall winner was Alex Lopez who I follow on his Youtube channel. The ratings are out for the tournament as it's crazy the level he must perform to. He gets 0 points for beating 1700 players and only gets 1 for beating 2000 rated players. If I beat one 1700 player I'd consider the tournament a great success!

    posted on January 15, 2017chess


    Cork Club Championship Round 2

    I played the second round of the Cork Club Championship and lost. My opponent was feeling a bit under the weather, so to go home early he launched a speculative attack which succeeded! I should bring Lemsip to these games in future.

    The computer says I had a chance to turn things around near the end by playing Bb8 on move 28. I think in practical terms it would have been very hard to spot that as my attention was focused on the pieces around the king and not the other side of the board. It's an instructive idea though - the mate threat keeps my opponent's queen pinned to the h file and allows me to trade it off and so end the attack.

    posted on December 9, 2016chess


    Munster League Division 1. Round 7ish.

    Round 7 of the Munster League continued and naturally the A team didn't have a full team. There were no B team games this weekend though so I was able to play up for them.

    I managed to win my game after my opponent miscalculated a tactic dropping a bishop for a couple of pawns. I went into an endgame with a knight and rook against a rook and two extra pawns and coverted it.

    This meant that the A team drew the match 2.5 - 2.5. I'll be expecting a trophy at the end of the season if they win the Championship!

    posted on December 4, 2016chess


    Cork Club Ladder Round 2

    The second round of the ladder continued and I had white against one of the top rated players in the club (1800+ ICU). I was expecting a draw at most but instead I won! I managed to get a passed pawn on the 6th rank and use that to attack.

    The game was played with no increment due to time constraints - I was a bit nervous about this as I normally bank on using the increment for any endgame. In this case i won just as we reached an endgame so I was ok on time.

    It's a pity these games aren't rated but if I keep playing like this then my rating should move up anyway.

    posted on December 3, 2016chess


    My Rating

    I've added a rating page to show my rating progress (or lack of it!) over time. The first few tournaments were calculating my provisional rating so there was a great deal of variance there. Now however I have a proper rating and am making some slight progress.

    The rating shown is my ICU rating which unfortunately is not an offical FIDE rating. However my Munster League matches count towards those so I should get one of those soon enough. But given the low amount of games which will be used to calculate that, I don't know how accurate that will be over time.

    posted on November 20, 2016chess


    Cork Club Championship Round 1

    Last Friday we kicked off the Cork Chess Club Championship for the new season.

    I won my first game. My opponent missed a pin against his rook in the middlegame and I was able to win material from there.

    posted on November 18, 2016chess


    Munster League Division 1. Rounds 5, 6 and 7.

    After our great start it was back down to earth with a wallop for the Cork B team in the last three rounds of the Munster League. First a 5-0 hammering at the hands of Cork A (our top scoring team member Walkover didn't show up for this match). Then a 4-1 loss to CCYMS followed by another 5-0 beating to Limerick A. We're in a bit of a precarious position after the first half of the league but hopefully can grab a few more points after the Christmas break.

    For me personally it was a very mixed bag of results. I had a good position in my game against Cork A. After twenty moves I was thinking that this was the best I'd ever played against a higher rated opponent - I actually understood the ideas in the position and what I could do. Then I missed a move to grab a pawn or two and it all fell to pieces after that :) No margin for error against 1700-1800ish opponents.

    Still I took positives from that game into my next game against a similarly rated opponent. I was a bit fortunate here as he achieved a really good position against me. Then however I think he pressed to much for an attack and his pieces became uncoordinated. I was lucky to trap his rook and ended up winning.

    My last game was against someone slightly higher rated than me and we reached a level enough endgame with a slight edge for white due to more centralised pieces. I think I could have repeated the position or offered a draw here but instead I kept going. Whenever I see Magnus Carlsen he always presses in positions where he has a slight advantage with little chance for him to lose - playing for two results. So I decided to try that approach, committed an absolute howler and lost! Still the only way for me to learn about endgames is to play them and I certainly learned a great deal in that loss.

    Back to club action for the next few weeks and the leagues resume for us in February.

    posted on November 13, 2016chess


    Cork Club Ladder Round 1

    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


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