It's over, done, finished, completed, ended, and did I mention it's finally through? Yes the 12 player round robin from hell is over. In principle it was a nice idea. Give the lower rated players a chance at playing some of the guys they don't normally get to play because their score isn't good enough. However the next time somebody says "Let's run a round robin." I'm going to say "Quads!" The first round was July 9th and the last game was completed on October 2nd. In between we had 3 kids drop out once school started, and one adult who was never sure whether he could make it or not so he eventually dropped out, and played less then half his games.
When it was all over the Top 3 looked like this:
1. Isaac Sherman 10-1
2. Duncan Foster 5-3 (2 unplayed games)
3. Silvio Rosato 5-6
One would think going 10-1 would rack up of massive amounts of rating points. Nope he only picked up 31 points. (Heck, I even picked up 29 points last night for scoring 1.5 - 2.5, but the average of my opponents was 2045.) The problem was his pre-event rating was 1799, and the average of his opponents was 1543. I guess he needed that 11th win. The big winners in the rating gains department were Sivio with +63 (opponent average 1568) and Dario with +61 (opponent average 1624).
Because this tournament was played out over the course of three months, I officially broke the 4,000 games played mark after submitting the event. Technically I probably played my 4000th game about 2 weeks ago, but because I didn't put the results on my monster spreadsheet until the tournament was completed, the games odometer didn't turn to 4,000 on the exact day I played #4,000. In fact when I put the results on my spreadsheet my total was up to 4,005. I can't even tell you if I won or lost my milestone game. (Note to self: Make sure you're not in the middle of some drawn out tournament when you go for 5,000.)
As for my results; well let's say this wasn't one of my better tournaments. 3 wins, 5 losses, 2 draws. My tournament ended the same way it started, losing to somebody with the last name of Dell'Orto. Unlike our last game, there were no early draw offers followed by horrendous blunders. Instead there were horrendous blunders on both our parts, that unfortunately I failed to take advantage of. Not only did I fail to capitalize on his mistakes, I turned around and made an even bigger one. Time read Blue Devil Knight's list again!
#7 Don't respond to phantom threats.
In this case slam dunk phantom threats.
#8 When under attack, keep your cool.
Plain and simple, I had a meltdown. I thought there was no way I could accept the sacrifice, I was sure I was getting mated if I accepted, so I spent very little time analyzing it. The real danger was from the bishop that he offered me, not from his rook. I couldn't see that so instead I looked at the lines that either lost material or lead to mate.
giancarlo-polly10108.pgn
I chose the line that lost material. After I played the move, and saw how my position was going all to hell I thought to myself. "You didn't really analyse what would have happened if you took the bishop." Too late. I could only do the "what if" with my buddy Fritz later.
5 comments:
I wonder what psychological reason you had to not see Rc4 and winning the bishop on g4?
I sometimes have it to that i playing reasonable throw the position away with one move. While being disgusted by my own move it suddenly make all bad moves instead of getting control of my emotions and trying to find a way to get out the mess i created for myself.
What move was that on? I still don't see it. I think I just overlooked it. Sometimes mistakes like that have nothing to do with our emotional state at the time.
It can be very hard to recover emotionally when we notice that we overlooked a really good move, and start kicking ourselves for missing the opportunity. If we dwell on it too much it becomes a distraction and takes away from the current position.
In this game I was fine until I panicked over the bishop sac. Once I chose to decline it I was lost, and it didn't matter how much mental fortitude I had at that point. A positive mind set was not going to change what was happening on the board.
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It was on move 33, you even analysed the winning the bishop move sequence.
Tiger: I think I missed Rc4 during the game because I was focusing so much on whether I wanted to push f5 or h5 to chase the bishop away. I never even saw the rook move until I was analysing the position later on my own. I think I was in defense mode because he had pressure on the f file. Lots of time attacking with a pawn is natural because the piece has to move away whereas when it's attacked by a piece another defender can come to protect.
I'm not sure if that's the point that his two brothers came in and watched the game for a little bit. But for what ever reason I make two terrible moves in a row. First was not playing Rc4, and second was refusing the sacrifice.
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