Wednesday, May 7, 2008

Wacky Wednesday! Who Wants to Lose??

Last night I played in the New York Experts at the Marshall and got crushed in the first round by an old nemesis who is making his chess comeback. This is the second time he's totally trashed me with black in less then a week. Before last week we had not played each other since 2005. Last night's game got me thinking about our various encounters from 2002 to 2005. Our 9th game is worthy of the Wacky Wednesday designation.

The first time we played he was going into third grade and was coming down to the Marshall every Thursday. His rating was moving up rapidly from 1100 at the start of 2002 to 1600 by the 2002 Annual list. Over the course of a year we played each other 8 times. He won the first 4 in a row, and then I won the next 4 in a row. Our 9th encounter was a comedy of errors. What can one say about a game where both players keeping hanging pieces? Remember the old maxim "Who ever makes the next to last mistake wins." This clearly applied here. If one did not know the players or ratings involved, he might think it was some game between a couple of 800 players. No notes or deep analysis included.




My last move was one of those time pressure implosions done when I had 21 seconds versus his 8 minutes and 21 seconds.

3 comments:

likesforests said...

I was going to say, your game looked much better than 800 level. Then I saw your last move. >:-]

likesforests said...

But we all do silly things under time pressure. :)

Polly said...

Neither of us seemed to want to win the game very much, but I guess I wanted it less. LOL

I think what the queen move so stupid was that I didn't move it many squares, and the piece that took it was right there. It wasn't like one of those hang the piece from a long diagonal type blunders. As Wang said. Doh!!!!