11TH CHERRY BLOSSOM CLASSIC

As it turns out I'm still alive.

Recently I played in the Cherry Blossom Classic. At the time I wasn't expecting much good to happen because my rating graph was dying slowly just like me after every brilliant game I play.

Naturally with me and my amazing rating graph on the downhill spiral I was expecting a nice -29 (FIDE) points decrease because I only lost -28 points last tournament (I like to beat my records). That would leave us with this question: Did I manage to go U2000 FIDE yet? Time to find out.

R1

I would like to preface this by saying that I started to feel unwell during round 6. So I decided to withdraw from the tournament after the sixth round. Please direct all hate comments to my chess.com inbox .

Decent win by me. I fumbled my advantage a little bit in the opening stage but other than that I would consider that a smooth win by me.

R2

A surprising upset by me all things considered. My first time trying advance caro-kann OTB as white paid off pretty well. Maybe I should start using this more instead of the 1. e4 c6 2. Nf3 system.

R3

Another smooth game by me. Sad to say I missed a chance to possibly win after move 32. Bc3! which apparently worked. I did see it but I didn't calculate it well enough and ended up playing a worse move. If there was anything to take away from this game it would probably be calculate more in the key positions.

R4

To be fair at the end, my position was either lost or bordering the brink of being lost anyway. That move Re1 was so unfathomably bad that I was asked later that night if it was a transmission error on the DGT board. Anyways, the opening worked out surprisingly well for me. He made some small slip ups yet those slip-ups snowballed into an amazing position for white. Yet I squandered it and my opponent found good counters and ended up outplaying me before snatching the full point. I feel like if you really look deep into this game you can see some moments where I played very timid moves, perhaps out of respect for my GM opponent? Moves such as 22. Kh1? and 24. Nc5!? I might have not played if I played lets say.. A 2200? So if there were any main takeaways from this game it would be..

1. Don't respect your opponent. This sounds very conceited but I obviously don't mean don't respect your opponent in general, but when I'm at the board playing having too much respect at the board can lead to you trusting everything your opponent plays, assuming that they can do no wrong. Obviously looking at the R4 game my opponent wasn't the perfect god I was assuming he was during the game. Everyone can make mistakes. No one is going to be perfect every game.

2. Don't go into the attack when your opponent has many defenders. My kingside aspirations were doomed from the start. Simply because black didn't weaken his KS to a bad degree, and his pieces were right there ready to be his safety net. I weakened my center in order to gain some kingside initiative. In that case the positional aspects outweighed the dynamic aspects.

R5

Sad that I snapped up his draw offer without thinking. Silman said that if a higher rated opponent offers a draw theres usually something wrong they feel about the position they have. I wish I remembered what he said at that time.

R6

Overall a pretty great tournament for me. Perhaps calculation-wise there was room for improvement in many of the games. Other than that most of my games were very smooth and it helped me regain the FIDE points I lost over 2023. 

Do I think this is a revival for me chess-wise? Not too sure, but this tournament helped me restore some lost confidence from the past tournaments that I suffered in. Next one is probably World Open unless I get sick/die (lets hope that doesn't happen) .

Bye.