NSWCA July Weekender

Another tournament, another kick in the pants.

Even though the score didn't reflect it, I think played better in this tournament than the last one.

Not too many drastic blunders, but still the result was that I got beaten by the people rated higher than me and held my own against people rated lower.

But still - that's no way to improve.

Results went something like this:

Round 1 - 1611 player (lost) although at least one person watching from the sidelines thought it might have been a draw

Round 2 - 1449 player (lost)

Round 3 - 990 player (draw - bishops of opposites colour)

Round 4 - unrated player (won) mostly because my opponent didn't see a way to sacrifice his rook to allow him to queen his pawn on the 7th rank

Round 5 - 1420 player (lost) we actually saw an endgame and a pawn promotion race in this one

Round 6 - 860 player (draw) after being down two pawns, then up a pawn, then equal, this rollercoaster ended when all the pieces came off the board with our pawns locked together

Round 7 - 1374 player (lost) this was pretty dreadful and involved missing one of his checks and later dropping a piece on move 24

2/7 is not something to write home about, but I think I'm playing more careful considered chess.

A couple of learnings:

Now that I'm making a conscious decision to slow down my thought process and consider all checks, candidates and threats I think I was playing a bit slow for the time control. In all but the last game I stopped writing my moves down because I was low on time.

After doing so many hundreds of chess exercises where each position had a chance to win material or mate, I was surprised to see how many of the positions had no tactics in them.

It's making me reconsider my approach to training and think that maybe the pendulum does need to swing back to general principles and some positional play.

Perhaps I should put this question out there:

When you look at a position and there are no tactics - what do you do? Once you've exhausted all the checks, captures and threats, is there any algorithm or thought process people use to come up with candidate moves?

Let me know what you think.