Chess on Twitter: ChessTweets

I've been playing a game on ChessTweets that I thought I would share. I'm black and it's started out as a standard King's Indian defence with white fianchettoing their white squared bishop. Having closed the centre (8. d5) white then advanced on the queenside with a3 and b4 which the Batsford book I have on the King's Indian doesn't think is the best idea for white as it messes up their queenside pawns. Naturally I didn't capture the b4 pawn but played ...Nb7 to support the pawn and withdraw the attacked knight. I'm happy with the arrangement of my queenside pieces: the knight is supporting d6 and c5 and the bishop is happy on the h3/c8 diagonal supporting ...f5 which is planned. The fact that the bishop is blocking the rook on the a file doesn't matter as the position is fairly closed and the rooks don't have much scope at the moment. My plan is based on ...f5 and following white's exf and my ...gxf pushing the e pawn to e4 bringing my black squared bishop on the long diagonal to life.

Conclusion: at the moment I'm happy with my position and the arrangement of my pieces. White has more space but the closed centre minimises any advantage and my pieces are well placed for a kingside advance, especially as white's bishop is misplaced on f3. Of course, I may have misjudged this all terribly.

Losing on the wrong end of the Sicilian

This is my latest loss to Fritz on the iPhone. It starts well (up to move 8 maybe) but goes down hill fast after that. the thing about playing good players (and computers) is that they punish small mistakes. I'll have a look at the game tonight on a board and maybe add some notes.

[Event "Game Without Clock"]
[Site "Fritz Chess for iPhone/iPod Touch"]
[Date "2010.08.26"]
[Round "?"]
[White "Fritz"]
[Black "Player"]
[Result "1-0"]

1.e4 c5
2.Nf3 e6
3.d4 cxd4
4.Nxd4 a6
5.c4 Qc7
This is what I've decided to play as black against e4, the Kan Sicilian (also sometimes known as the Paulsen or Taimanov. I'm not sure if the last is strictly correct as many writers talk about the Taimanov's key move as an early ...Nc6).
6.Nc3 Nc6
7.Nxc6 dxc6
8.Bg5 Bc5
9.Qd2 f6
10.Bh4 Ne7
11.Bg3 e5
12.Na4 Ba7
13.Be2 O-O
14.Rd1 b5
15.cxb5 cxb5
16.Nc3 Bb7
17.Qd7 Rac8
18.Qe6+ Rf7
19.Rd7 Qc5
20.Rxb7 b4
21.Rxe7 Qxe7 1-0

Fritz and Shredder on the iPhone

Besides the games I play for Hackney Chess Club and the BBC Chess Club I don't really get to play in real life. I've played the 5, 10 and 15 minute games online and while they're fun (if feeling your heart in your mouth while sitting in front of a laptop is your idea of fun) I remain unconvinced that they help your overall chess skills.

The first games I played online before I joined the clubs and what probably got me back into chess were on Facebook. I used one of the many chess apps available but rather than live chess there would be a 3 day time limit on each move. This worked pretty well and at times I'd set up a board to look at a position.

So now I've started playing games on the iPhone but without a time limit using the Fritz and Shredder apps. There's time to think about the position, it's possible to go back, run some analysis in retrospect. Typically I play a move and look again a couple hours later. I was using the feature in Shredder where it adapts its ranking according to the result of the last game it played against you but I found its faux mistakes (like giving away a piece randomly) annoying. So for the last few games I've stuck to playing Fritz on the strongest setting. I've also stuck to playing the opening repertoire I plan to use when the new season kicks off.

In his very useful book Studying Chess Made Easy, Andrew Soltis points out that at the end of the day there is no silver bullet and the way to get better at chess is to spend a lot of time studying it on your own. At the moment given my time constraints playing on my phone seems like the best option.

[Update 14/09/10: There's a review of the Andy Soltis book (Studying Chess Made Easy) I mentioned above on the Guardian's website where it's been nominated by Daniel King on their "2010 Book of the Year short-list". I'm guessing he means "Chess Book of the Year short-list". Good as the book is you probably need to be a chesser to appreciate it.]

Holiday chess books: what did I learn

Away on holiday for 10 days and as usual I took a couple chess books and a set. The two books I chose were John Nunn's Chess Puzzle Book and the Second Piatigorsky Cup. The Piatigorsky book was an old second hand copy from an excellent bookshop in Norwich. It features annotations by the competing grandmasters which is what I liked about it. It's all very well playing though games but the tricky bit is knowing why they did what they did.

The plan had been to do the puzzles while chilling on the beach (as it turned out I read Saul Bellow's Herzog instead) and to play though a few of the games in the evening while getting slowly hammered on duty free Bushmills Malt Whiskey.

As it turned out the only use the board got was to play a couple games with Russ, one of the people who we were staying with. I mentioned chess and he said he'd like to play. A quick brush up of the rules and we were off. He was pretty good and played a thoughtful game. I won both games but I suspect if Russ had played in matches over the last two years he'd probably be better than me. As we played we'd each give our thoughts every few moves on what was happening.

There were several interesting things that came out of the game and the ongoing analysis.

Russ was suspicious of early castling which I advocated when we were going over the first game as he didn't like the idea of putting his king in the corner to be attacked so early on. There are times when it makes sense to wait for the other player to reveal some of their intentions it made me realise the importance of tempo and threats. "You might know where my king is but I'll get my attack in first so it won't matter" might be a useful summary.

Also most of the people I play in matches are better than me so generally I think they're seeing more of what's going on than me. Also their feel for the positions is more refined. By that I don't mean they're calculating more moves or variations but that their understanding of the position, based on experience allied with an affinity for the game, is more advanced than mine.

This expresses itself in the fact that they 1. play better moves than me and 2. they do it consistently. The third thing is that they probably play to a consistent plan which I've constantly failed to do. It's called prevarication.

In this instance the tables were turned. It's nice to play but it's also nice to win occasionally.