I have to lose to you Tu?: FIDE Round Robin Round 4
All photos courtesy of Joseph Truelson via the blog "My chess games, achievements, and failures!" None of them were used with permission of the people within them. And no, I do not apologize.
Oh, and the first picture is actually by Victoria Jung-Doknjas, used WITHOUT permission of the photographer. I really hope they aren't reading this....
Anyways, the name of this blog is in no doubt due to the name of my opponent, Robin Tu. He was tired of hearing me throughout the previous day saying "RAR" and whatever nonsense. So he decided to put an end to this. By actually following my advice! He did a RAR attack! Of course, one reason that he probably felt that he could get away with this was because I was doing so badly in this tournament, losing every decent position I got. So, I must say to Tu (confusing pun), nice job! f4 in the opening is always successful.
At this point in the tournament I knew that I needed to change my results. When I came to the event Ignacio Perez, a master and a former state champion, saw me and we took the elevator down and talked for a while in the skittles room. He is an amazing attacker, and was kind enough to talk to a terrible player like me and give me some advice. Ignacio highly values the initiative, and started to show me some of the basics of the Modern. The thing is, I was doing so badly that I was willing to try anything. And since I like playing every opening, I decided to give the Modern/Pirc/whatever opening a try. It wasn't a bad idea. In fact, I will ALWAYS play it from now on (Yes! Now all of my future opponents will spend hours preparing for me with an opening that I will play 10% of the time! I'm so smart! HAHAHA!)
The Modern is a good opening, and very sharp and agressive and dangerous for both sides. Unfortunately, I am the exact opposite. I am a bad closing (not sure what that means), dull and passive. So I was defintetly playing the wrong opening. But still, for now I'm expiermenting, and be playing every opening and posting them, I'll be giving my opponents a lot of grief! (Even though they could play anything good and crush me). In fact, my 7th round opponent told me that he prepared 1.f4 against me (he was Black), because I talked about it so much during the tournament. Then I asked him if he had heard that I play every opening (It's very well known by now!). He said he did, and that he prepared every opening! WOW! This guy sure has a lot of free time! If only I did...
Anyways, the main difference between this FIDE Roundrobin tournament and the last one was this: In the last one I won lost positions, while in this one I lost drawn positions. I guess the advice for the reader is, never play drawish chess against me! (I hate it when that happens!)
I guess I'm being too self centered here. I should mention other things about the tournament. The Kings had been crushed in Round 3 by 1.5-7.5! (Not that I care and that I repeated that a lot). I had also been crushed in Round 3, and I did care about that. Mary Kuhner and Eric Zhang (who I got to play in the first and last rounds, interesting!), were leading the event with 3-0 and were ready to go dominate the field. The lower FIDE roundrobin section wasn't important to anyone, but the people there were great and I had a fun time talking to them! Here's some pictures of them:
This nice buddy was always so encouraged and upbeat during the event! It didn't matter how many losses he had, he was always ready to comeback and win the next blitz game against us. Meanwhile, Anthony He (Never mention names! He is the evil one with glasses in the picture) sabatoged my online game against him, by taking my iPad and sacrificing my queen against him (check move 6). I'll RAR him next time... In fact I did it in this event! You'll see later how I RARed that "master". In fact, I learned that he changed his middle name to to Anthony, so now his name is "Master Anthony He". He told me that when he becomes an IM (which will happen soon!) that he will get rid of his middle name Anthony so that he will be International Master He. I should do that too. That way everyone could say "I want to play you Master!". Or I could name myself Grandmaster... or RAR Master!
If only I could have played like I did before I would have done fine in this event. But gone was the old Joseph, who played at 1900 strength, and the new one was here, who played at 1600 strength. Not that smart, but for some reason I was so much more funny. Anytime I heard anything, I was able to make fun of it and seemed to be a lot of smiles on peoples faces. That was nice, but that was between the rounds. During the rounds I was putting an equal number of grumpy faces trying to find the most polite way to tell me to be quite. (Or some of them not so politely). That's right. They didn't want me to be quiet, they wanted me to be quite.
Anyways, I guess I should add another picture.
This is also my profile picture, and I assure you that this picture was NOT used with this kid's permission. In fact, I had anything but! Photo exclusive to chess.com users who decided to read this. You guys get rewarded for reading this boring stuff!
To get to the game, I decided to play a Modern. And as usual, my opponent was more prepared than me.
Self Destruct in the Opening
When I don't know an opening I tend to do very badly. Maybe if I always played the same opening, something I used to do, I would get better results.
The rest of the game
Robin Tu isn't perfect at chess either, and ended up giving me a lot of chances. But as always, I play really well to get a drawn position, only to blow it. Terrible!
And finally, after this game, I got the coveted last place, when Shridar, the lowest rated person in the field, beat Karthik. 0.5/4! Wow, that is pretty bad, isn't it! But I think I had a few things to take away from this game:
1. One very sensible move can easily cost the game! My two blunders, exd6, and h5, were natural moves.
2. I need to realize how important it is not to mess up in a pawn ending. It happenned again later in this tournament. Not that good. My assumption that it was a draw was correct, and yet, I couldn't find it! Next time I probably should calculate pawn endings more.
3. Once you're losing, it's hard to stop: I kind of lost all confidence in myself, as you'll see in the next game. Even in fine positions I didn't have the confidence to play on, and I felt like I wouldn't win for a long time.
4. Winning a chess game is great! After this tournament, I felt a lot more happy about my victories, because I hadn't done it for a while.
I was last place, and got to play someone else who wasn't doing too great, Zachary Zhang, who was at 1/4 and in the 1700's. Would I finally win a game? Or would I continue to fail?
Find out in my next blog... next year
