Teamleague 37 - Round 1

It's great to see 16 teams entered in the U2000 section of Teamleague 37, we've been split into 2 groups for a 7-round round-robin, to be followed by a play-off between the groups.

Team Current_Affairs final starting squad with fixed ratings is:

• bash 2139
• Mapleleaf (Deputy Captain) 1872
• SimianChatter 1802
• Plebusan (Captain) 1775
• blackk 1728
• mejdanblues 1661

The plan is to play about 5 rounds each to rotate players into the line-up.

I've only time for a quick wrap-up of round 1 (so no one thinks I'm shirking!), I'll publish some analysis of my game when I have a little more time.

With Monkey Club fielding 1900+ players on all boards it was a tough first round for everyone and I think the 0-4 result doesn't reflect the quality of the games. Mejdanblues especially played a terrific game, as always punching well above his weight against an opponent rated 250 points higher. He certainly had drawing opportunities in a tricky, highly technical endgame (N vs B, Pawn, then Q), and possibly even winning chances.

I wasn't altogether unhappy with my own game. I ran through '1001 Winning Chess Sacrifices and Combinations' for 45 minutes or so before the game, and I can work through 150-200 positions in that time now. It's interesting to notice 'Chess Vision' starting up within the first 20 or so problems doing this. Rehearsing known positions (as opposed to solving them) seems to warm up the parts of the brain that do pattern recognition during the game.

So I was seeing the board quite well, but my ability to accurately analyse and assess variations is still sadly lacking. Now I feel my tactics are improving, it's time to begin the next phase of this excercise and start on my analysis skills. This is done by taking complcated middlegame positions, writing down all the variations you can see, and then comparing them to GM annotations, as described by Kotov in 'Think Like a Grandmaster'.

My time management, which is usually quite good, was also a bit off in this game - too long spent in the opening and early middle game left me playing on my increments for the last few moves.