Sunningdale: express report

I followed my good performance in the Major Open with a dismal performance at the e2e4 Sunningdale International.  The only positive thing which can be said about it is that a loss was not my most common result; I had four losses and five draws.  It’s hard to say what exactly caused such a collapse, but I can honestly say that my standard of play was not as bad as the results suggest.  In one of the drawn games I was completely winning but fell for a thinly-veiled stalemate trap, and in three of my losses I had the draw in hand but overpressed trying to win.  Had I not played in this event my first FIDE rating would have been close to 2100; as it is it may drop below the 2000 mark.  A more extensive report including games will follow at some point after I get home.

7 thoughts on “Sunningdale: express report

  1. An important skill you have to learn on the road to GM is when to press for the win and when to settle for a draw. Or perhaps, how to press for a win without losing the draw in hand…. In any case, you’ve learned a good bit about that in your last tournament. Congratulations!

    Sooner or later your growing skill will show up in your rating, so don’t be worried about the Elo. Worrying about your Elo might be one of the biggest potholes on the road to GM. Not that I can speak from personal experience…. 🙂

  2. Progress in chess is not a linear process, as explained by Nikitin in his book about Kasparov’s early years. And to keep mentioning books, both Capablanca and Karpov have published a book with all their lost games, and what they learned from them. Finally this quote by Sabielly Tartakower, “pour gagner il faut savoir perdre”, to win you have to accept to lose.

    Dunno what the opposition was, nor whether you thought that you were the favourite, but in one book J. Nunn describes how the better player loses.
    “Ok I have two candidate moves, A and B. Let’s calculate A… [15 min of calculations] ok it’s a draw. But my position has to be winning, because hey I am the better player, and as A is only a draw, then B is necessarily a winning move, let’s play it [without any calculation]” and as the game goes on the better player keeps avoiding all the drawish lines he sees, getting each time a worse position.

  3. Chris, Harvey, osvaldo and Didac,

    Thank you very much for the encouraging comments. I’ll take a few days semi-break from chess now, and then analyse my games carefully over the next few weeks, to see if I can pin down exactly what went wrong this tournament.

    Will

  4. First of all: chin up. If you play a lot of tournaments every now and then you’re going to suck at one of them. Probably nothing more but the law of averages.

    That said,

    “I can honestly say that my standard of play was not as bad as the results suggest. In one of the drawn games I was completely winning but fell for a thinly-veiled stalemate trap, and in three of my losses I had the draw in hand but overpressed trying to win.”

    If you draw a game you were winning and lose games you were drawing then, I would humbly suggest, that *is* playing badly. Not playing badly all game, perhaps, but playing badly nonetheless. As folk have said above, this is probably something a bit more experience will help with – although we all still do it.

    Anyway, there’ll be another tournament soon enough. You can make amends for Sunningdale then.

    1. You’re right of course – I did play badly in most games at some point, and in some games most of the way through! The point I’m trying to make is that I could quite easily have gained several more points by accepting draw offers or by not playing on with moves which I knew were probably objectively too risky. In other words, my ambition, as well as my lack of skill, contributed to the poor result.

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