The Chess Improver: My 6th tournament game: an error that reveals an attempt to learn
For The Chess Improver, I wrote ""My 6th tournament game: an error that reveals an attempt to learn"".
(The original Chess Improver site is no longer active; the rescued article follows below.)
Continuing my series on my first chess tournament, which I played in 1980, I cover my round 6 game, which ended up being the third draw in 6 rounds. There is a pattern here to note: at this USCF 1500-1600 level of play, games very easily end in draws, because of missed opportunities in the middlegame, inappropriate simplification into an endgame, and then inaccurate endgame play leading to a final simplification after which no progress can be made by either side. We already saw this in my round 3 game.
Summary of the game
Having scored 3 out of 5 points so far in the tournament, I got to play someone rated around 1600. I was White.
Opening
To my surprise, as Black he played an opening continuation in the Philidor Defense known to be bad. Unfortunately, because I saw the resemblance between the position and the famous 1858 game by Paul Morphy against the Duke of Brunswick and Count Isouard, at move 7 I swung my Queen over to b3 just as Morphy had done, even though because Black’s 6th move was different, this move was harmless. Playing by analogy rather than by calculation is sometimes reasonable, but in this case it was thoughtless.
The result was that Black forced a Queen trade immediately. This combined with the symmetrical Pawn structure meant that in the absence of gross errors, the likely result of the game was a draw. (Recall that in my round 2 game, in a Petroff where the Queens also got traded quickly, my game should have been a draw, but I accidentally won anyway.)
An error that reveals an attempt to learn
In the middlegame, I made a curious and admittedly ugly and poor positional and tactical error of advancing my f-Pawn with 13 f4, to try to undermine Black’s e-Pawn and attack on the King side. This resulted in my isolating my own e-Pawn and then losing it. The resulting simplified position, nevertheless, was easily drawable.
What I want to talk about is the nature of this error. It’s a pretty bad error, but I think it illustrates that sometimes, when progressing in chess, it is common to make an error that nevertheless has clear motivations behind it. Here, I made this error because
I wanted to unbalance a dead symmetrical position in order to play for a win, showing an active fighting spirit I had not always shown earlier in the tournament. I had been reluctant to make Pawn breaks in earlier games, but was warming up to the idea that Pawn breaks were important.
In other words, even though the plan was completely misguided, it showed that I was now willing to take risks to unbalance a position. I think an important stage in developing as a chess player is that of trying a different way of thinking, even if it is actually not carried out well. That is better than simply being stuck in a rut, in which case there is no way to improve. Currently, as an instructor and coach, I look for ways in which someone is stuck in a rut, a plateau, and encourage doing something different even if it initially backfires.
Endgame
I would call the position after move 18 and endgame: a lot of simplification, White a Pawn down, two Rooks and Bishop vs. two Rooks and Knight.
It turned out that neither player knew how to optimize using either the Bishop or the Knight imbalance in the endgame, so the endgame was a typical trading of errors until all the Pawns came off the board and all that was left was a Bishop vs. Knight, so a draw was agreed.