Chess players are very rational people. This is a truth universally acknowledged, to borrow a phrase. This is why Garry Kasparov was so well qualified to write a book explaining how to run a business.
Chess is so deeply connected with reasonable decision-making that crypto sponsors saw the potential in advertising to the kind of sophisticated, Apollonian audience you could only reach through chess tournament sponsorship. In a mood of such unsurpassed rationality I spent half of a recent Sunday travelling on characteristically delayed British trains and the other half losing chess games.
I scored 2.5/11 in the Summer Quickplay Championship, where my team came a very presentable 1st in the round robin before losing the playoff on board order. Aside from the first game, which was very high quality, I just couldn’t put anything decent together. I fumbled wins, fumbled draws and lost a couple of especially unpleasant games very prosaically to the sort of generic Stonewall plans I should at least try to understand. I was playing at a glacial pace and somehow rushing at the same time. Worst of all, with one exception, I didn’t really feel like I should be an underdog by playing strength if I was playing well. Still, it’s important to take lessons from the mental resilience of great players like Korchnoi and Smyslov and therefore I can only conclude it was not my fault and I was hypnotised.
More positively, I had a very good classical game against one of the county’s stronger players (no.5 or 6, I think, with a rating of 2060). After neutralising a Symmetrical English with black I managed to reach this position:
23…f4! Intending 24.exf4 exf4 25. Bxf4 Rxf4! 26. gxf4 Qxh4. The machine god has a path for white to survive the resulting position but it’s very narrow indeed. Trevor instead found the interesting idea of Rg1 f3+ Kf1 eventually managing to activate his rook along the h-file. I played very well and had opportunities for a win but they really weren’t obvious misses or anything and Trevor very creditably found some counterplay in a horrible-looking position and wriggled out of it to a draw.
I’m playing through St. Petersburg 1914. Tournaments from the 1910s-20s have a very specific charm where players with the positional understanding of a donkey somehow continually grab half-points against some of the strongest players of all time. In addition, it just misses the late 1920s and early 1930s where understanding seems to expand exponentially so you don’t need to know any theory or have a real strategic understanding to enjoy the story of each game.
Games:
Trevor Brotherton (2060) – Rob Nield (1760) ½-½ - As above.
In the latest ECF rating list I lost 241 rapid rating points. Please call off your parapsychologists. I have suffered enough.
(Edit: Proving the curse, when I emailed this out it had a million subscribe buttons which didn’t show in the preview and still don’t show any other way I can view it than email. I apologise to anyone whose enjoyment of a million subscription buttons has been watered down by chess-related whining sandwiched between them.)