Sept 13: A Rough Start and some insights

Hi all, I was happy to get in the swing of things today; overall positive but I did struggle psychologically, trying to adjust to taking the game seriously again.

The main thing we can learn from today is about the balance between a wise degree of thoroughness and an unhelpful degree of over-analysis. I found myself using a lot more time than usual to play moves of the same, or worse, quality as I would likely normally play.

I think it is important not to let excessive nit-picking get in the way of your feeling for the truth of a position; in the evaluation stage you assess, unhurriedly, the interactions between the pieces, the potential threats and vulnerabilities for each side, and some more general positional considerations that all help you decide on a move.

And then the important questions to ask yourself before making a move are:

1. what do I think the best move is here
2. is there a reason why that's not true

Today I had trouble with my thoughts stumbling over each other, each thought undermining the other, resulting in a lot of time trouble, some pretty average gameplay, and no small degree of stress.

Here's what I did today.

Puzzles:
#1:
CT puzzle rating: 1963
Correct after 7:04 mins

#2:
CT puzzle rating: 1838
Correct after 10:11 mins

#3:
CT puzzle rating: 2062
Failed after 15:47

Games:
I played 5 rapid games today (as well as some other time controls) and gained 2 rating points.

First game of the day was pretty instructive - I'd come back from a short break following the puzzles, but my mind was still sending itself in circles, and it showed. Time control: 10 mins

Game two was much cleaner, but my opponent played poorly in the opening and generally did not cause many problems. Time control: 10 + 5

I won't annotate game three as it's pretty quick. The computer is pretty harsh on this game, but I don't think it was too bad. However, now I know for next time that 6. Bh5+, while tempting, is not theoretically correct and it's best to simply play 6. Bg3.

Game 4 was also pretty good, but again, my opponent dropped some pawns and didn't make any counterplay I couldn't manage.

I had meant to stop at game 4 but wound up habitually accepting a random challenge from the pool while I was doing some other stuff. I actually am not too unhappy with how the middlegame went, was happy to find the tricky move 17... f5. Sadly I had a lapse of concentration later on; I clicked over from another tab, targeted the b2 pawn... and hung my bishop.

I might play some more tomorrow and go over a master game; we will see how I feel and how much time I have in the day, otherwise I will just have a rest day.

Thanks for reading :)