Greetings players and fellow patzers 🙂
Last weekend I played an OTB tournament in my local town, Doncaster,
entering the tough Major section with an Under 2000 rating cap.
I was 20th seed out of 28 entrants, just highlighting the expected difficulty.
Furthermore, my form heading into the tournament was not great,
with only 1 win in my previous 6 games, so I was not expecting much!
Round 1 - Ben Rich (1962) vs Zak Tomlinson (1810)
The first game had me paired against 3rd seed and with Black, so a tough start!
Time controls were 1hr 30 mins + 10 secs increment per move.
As with tradition, I'll share the Stockfish evaluation summary for my moves in each game.
Inaccuracies - 3
Mistakes - 1
Blunders - 0
Avg. centipawn loss - 20
Accuracy - 93%
So a decent start vs a tough opponent... but it only gets tougher!
Round 2 - Zak Tomlinson (1810) vs Seth Woozeer (1999)
A slight background to this pairing is that me and Seth have played a couple rapid games before,
with us scoring a win each, but this is our first classical game.
Before we started, I jokingly mentioned to Seth that since we last played, his rating had shot up
by around 200 points, whereas mine had stayed the same... he simply nodded and confirmed it 🙂
With him being top seed in the Major, getting a result would not be a simple task!
Inaccuracies - 0
Mistakes - 2
Blunders - 1
Avg. centipawn loss - 23
Accuracy - 92%
So another great result, albeit with some luck this time!
I'm sure Seth would have seen the Rc8 tactic if he had more time on the clock.
Let's see if my luck carries heading into round 3.
[Round 3 - James Zarzecki (unrated) vs Zak Tomlinson (1810)
During lunch, I saw that I was paired vs an unrated player on 2/2 and that I'd have Black,
which is never ideal, so had a "oh boy, here we go" type reaction.
My opponent had only played a handful of OTB games heading into this tournament, mostly wins,
so I knew I had to be prepared for a potentially rough ride.
The clock also became a factor, with my dropping to under a minute!
Rules allow that when a player drops below 5 minutes, they don't have to write moves.
I took advantage of this and stopped writing my moves throughout the endgame sequence.
The final mating position appeared as below, when following Bb8-a7, I played Rf3-f1#
Like I mentioned, I cannot remember all the moves that lead to mate.
Rather comically, this was further confused when I asked my opponent if I could copy
his moves down onto my sheet... it turns out he had written some incorrect moves,
and between us we tried recreating the sequence afterwards, but couldn't do it!
I was purely focused on not losing on time in the endgame, as on multiple occasions
my clock would drop to around 30 seconds... so the 10 sec increment really saved me here.
My opponent played quite fast, finishing the game with around 30 mins left.
He was relatively inexperienced, having played under 10 games OTB... so experience really did count.
Inaccuracies - 4
Mistakes - 0
Blunders - 1
Avg. centipawn loss - 25
Accuracy - 91%
I had a half-point bye for round 4, meaning I would be well rested and ready for the tournament finale.
Round 5 - Zak Tomlinson (1810) vs Leo Cheung (1907)
Final Round - and, although I was rested and hoping to win, I ultimately decided to 'chicken out'
and take the pragmatic option of a quick draw, guaranteeing at least joint 1st.
The surprising part about my quick draw was that it was against a junior player (12 yrs old)
who was fairly higher rated and a half point behind, so I presumed we'd play 'til the end!
Here's the game, although there isn't much to write about...
A "GM draw", so the stats reflect as such...
Inaccuracies - 0
Mistakes - 0
Blunders - 0
Avg. centipawn loss - 10
Accuracy - 96%
In the end, one of the other boards I was waiting on ended in a decisive result,
meaning I finished joint 1st with one other player, netting £300 each.
The final ranking cross-table is below, for those interested:
https://s1.chess-results.com/tnr1345039.aspx?lan=1&art=4&SNode=S0
This was a satisfying tournament for a couple main reasons.
First, it's only my second Major victory, with the first one being as far back as July 2022.
Second, it happened to take place in my hometown, making it extra sweet! 🙂
As always, I hope that folks get something out of my sharing these games, perhaps a lesson about:
Positional assessment and endgame calculation (game 1)
Tactics awareness (game 2)
Time management (game 3)
or Pragmatic decision making (game 4)
Cheers all,
~64
@64squaresofpain saidEyup Zak,nice to hear from you again.
Round 5 - Zak Tomlinson (1810) vs Leo Cheung (1907)
Final Round - and, although I was rested and hoping to win, I ultimately decided to 'chicken out'
and take the pragmatic option of a quick draw, guaranteeing at least joint 1st.
The surprising part about my quick draw was that it was against a junior player (12 yrs old)
who was fairly higher rated and ...[text shortened]... reness (game 2)
Time management (game 3)
or Pragmatic decision making (game 4)
Cheers all,
~64
Unfortunately,I can't follow your games on my chromebook.The font is too big to fit the screen.It's the same with chess puzzles and greenpawns' blogs.
The board setting adjustments make no difference to pgn's,fens or whatever they are.
Well done anyway
@venda saidMany thanks for posting these here, I'm going to spend a pleasant couple of hours replaying them on my board along with a cup of Earl Grey! 🙂
Eyup Zak,nice to hear from you again.
Unfortunately,I can't follow your games on my chromebook.The font is too big to fit the screen.It's the same with chess puzzles and greenpawns' blogs.
The board setting adjustments make no difference to pgn's,fens or whatever they are.
Well done anyway
@mchill saidI do have a board and pieces.What I found in the old days before online stuff was when played through the games from books,i tended to make wrong moves by mistake which meant going back and finding where I had gone wrong which was really tiresome.
Many thanks for posting these here, I'm going to spend a pleasant couple of hours replaying them on my board along with a cup of Earl Grey! 🙂
@venda saidI agree. Thanks to today's technology however I can place my notebook at a 45-deg. angle to my left, set up my board click on the move then move the piece. Far fewer mistakes that way. 🙂
I do have a board and pieces.What I found in the old days before online stuff was when played through the games from books,i tended to make wrong moves by mistake which meant going back and finding where I had gone wrong which was really tiresome.