The 38th Annual World Open is underway!! There are 4 front runners in the open section: Francisco Vallejo Pons, P Harikrishna, Sandipan Chanda, and Luke McShane all have 2 points after the first couple of rounds in the 7-day event. More GMs are expected to come as the layered schedules unfold.My games begin tonight as I play in the 5-day schedule. Come find me if you are here or wish me luck ( or at least not to blunder).
I'll try to keep you posted on the road from an Class B player's perspective.
9 comments:
I thought about coming. I've been to 3 of them, and enjoyed them all. Probably next year.
I like the photo of the victorious, no longer troubled knight (arches are always a symbol of triumph, right?). It reminds me of photos by another blogger who always used a pawn as a prop.
Wish I were in Philly (Valley Forge). Give 'em Hell!
@es: I was inspired by CL when I took the picture. I figured the knight was more my style. Wishing CL was here...the Lebowski round won't be the same.
Good luck in the tournament. Hope the points will come game after game (probably it will stop if you have to play against the person in your previous post. :-) )
Since you're in the area, you could try to steal the Liberty Bell. (It's harder than it looks.)
We'll be rooting for you to beat down your opponents.
Good luck on mowing them all down one by one. ;-D
Consider this a training tournament. Your next tourney will be better, much better.
Blunderprone, maybe you did what I did in my last game, one blunder and I resigned. Then I read the Karpov quote in this month's CL where he is basically saying his biggest strength comparatively was defense, holding lost positions, and I felt guilty.
Funny part is I was over at my opponent's house the other day and showed him the move that I would have played had I not been so timid and wimpy and it just destroyed his position, was winning in just a couple moves.
Tournament chess is a funny thing, there is a psychological component to each game. Perhaps a lot of people don't want to hear it cause it sounds "whiney" but it is a very real part of the game and result, IMHO.
I think your positional chess has improved a lot, so I think there is something else going on, perhaps openings experiments, or simple tactical rust?
Good luck in the final rounds. The best way to hold your rating is to play out the final rounds. I quit on a couple tournaments because my score was awful, and it dinged my rating big-time compared to taking a couple easy last round games that I probably could have won.
BTW, post the badness! :-)
I always seem to learn something from your games. You have a lot of positional advice to offer from your games. Some of your "mistakes" are very subtle, non-obvious that others can learn something from.
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