Chess on the road...

I was recently out of town and on a lazy day of sipping on lemonade and enjoying the end of summer I was able to travel to the Orange County chess club and picked up a sidegame outside on their outside patio. It was a nice afternoon game with a player named Javier Bolognia. He was an older gentleman whom also was in town visiting from somewhere in Europe, I think Portugal.

Anyway I was very eager to get a game against someone new, he said he didn't have a chess rating but played people of FIDE 2000 and could hold his own. This immediately got my attention and I was eager to play! I told him I wasn't very good and that I would try to give him a good game.

I had the white pieces and I had a fantastic performance...well I'll let you see for yourself!

One of my better games. I was excited for a new opponent, I believe he played a bit passive in the opening and underestimated my attack. Still I was able to find lots of good moves without a big blunder.

GM Games

Recently I've been looking over some GM level games, in fact quite a few of them and trying absorb a bit from the moves. I've been going over Fischer's games as well as Botvinnik from Kasparov's "My Great Predessors" series.

In that vein I have been trying to create a disipline and with any luck, a love of deeper analysis. For now I only have the patientce to look at several games in a short period of time. I'm hoping that I begin to enjoy looking at the sub-lines and other ideas presented in the annontation. For now I don't look at many of them. Reason being that as I look at the long tangent line I don't really understand what is going on enough to get a whole lot out of it.

I am especially interested in looking at games that are played in similar openings to my own repertoire since they tend to have ideas that may come up in my own contests, as well as leading to similar middle and endgames.

One thing that has stood out in Bobby Fischer's games seems to be his sublime understanding of the position in comparison to all of his competition. It seems that even when his opponent gets a good initiative or advantage on him he is able to flip the game around and take control.

Well just a few quick thoughts, and I am really considering playing in the Far West Open!