Wednesday Wackiness

I had wanted to post a game that tied in to the theme of losing totally "won" games that was discussed this week on DrunknKnites's blog, and followed up with a very insightful post from Phaedrus. I can't find the particular game I'm looking for. I've played that opponent over 50 times, so it's hard to look through all my games. I emailed him to see if he has the game handy.

Instead I will take you back to the 70s and amuse you with probably one of my worst games of chess ever. This game was not of those ones where I walked into some book trap that loses in 12 moves. This game consisted of a bunch of random moves where it seemed that black had no idea what she was doing. It's a game that I now use as an instructional example of the consequences of poor development and planning. It's so bad that I'm too embarrassed to tell the class that I was black.

The game is from a match I played in the Commercial Chess League back in 1979. The matches were played after work at one of the teams' office. We were the visiting team so we made our way down from midtown Manhattan to Port Authority's offices in lower Manhattan. I don't know if I had a bad day at the office, or maybe I caught some brain eating disease on the subway ride downtown. There seems to be no other plausible explanation for such piss poor moves.



I played like an 800, but my USCF rating was in the 1400s at the time. These matches were not USCF rated. The league had their own rating system. We all have those days where we seem to forget everything we know about chess. That seemed to be one of those days.