After going 4-0 and winning the Under 1700 section in January, I decided to move up into the Under 2000 section for February. This isn’t so absurd, as my rating after the January tournament went up to 1601, but due to the way the USCF ratings system works the ratings lag by about 2 weeks, so my official printed rating for February was 1491. The only real affect that this has is that if you are at the bottom of the group you are more likely to be forced to take a bye if there are an odd number of players, and indeed, in round 2 I was paired out of my section (receiving a full point bye) and had a side game (still rated but doesn’t contribute to tournament standings) against George Callahan. I’ll post that game later.
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I went into this last round game for the January Metrowest Chess Club tournament with 3/3 points and a chance to win the section if I won this game. I’d been playing pretty good chess all month so I was hopeful. I was outrated, but not by so much that I was intimidated.  angles by Stephen Gray When I started this version of my blog, one of my ideas was to do a series of interviews with photographers whose work I’ve liked, especially those that have made me think differently about photography. Stephen Gray, xgray on Flickr, has totally altered the way I think about photography. His work forces me to see the world around me differently, and completely changed the way I think about composition. Shadows and negative space also figure prominently in his work, and it is his photos with brilliant sunlight and deep shadows cutting across the frame that most capture my imagination. xgray is also a master of the found scene and taking simple, mundane objects and making the viewer look at them in a different way. This is also the first photographer whose work I have seen and then consciously tried to emulate. I’m sure that if I can learn to see the world like he does, which is very much how the camera sees it, I will be a better photographer. I sent him a few questions and his answers are below, along with a handful of my favorite images he’s produced. You can see more shots that I feel best represent what I find fascinating about Stephen Gray’s work in a Flickr gallery I created here and you can find my (so far limited) experimentation with doing work like this here. Continue reading Photographer Interview – Stephen Gray (xgray) Having won the first two games of the January tournament, I was paired against a strong player in round 3. Larry Kleine, 1651. I’ve only played a few games in my chess career against players over 1600, but with white I’ve now scored 4.5/7 against them, which is respectable. (Interestingly, I’ve never beaten a player rated over 1550 as black…) As is often the case against the stronger players this was a pretty clean and well played game. Sadly, the ending is somewhat marred by the fact that on my last move I turned a winning position into a draw, and that my opponent didn’t recognize this and resigned anyway. This was my fourth encounter with Mr. Hong. In our previous 3 games I had managed a measly half a point, but last night I got the better of him. I don’t think we were playing on even footing though: he had an unexpectedly complicated evening and arrived late and a bit frazzled. In the past he’s shown himself to be an extremely solid player. A long day at work finished with a zany commute home and barely getting to the tournament site on time combined with a month long layoff from competitive chess is a recipe for disaster, and disaster found me quickly in this one. Fortunately I was able to trap my opponent’s queen and swindle a win. Round 2 of the MCC Holiday Swiss tournament happened last night and I was paired with Alex Fauman, the youngest member of a chess playing family that are regulars at the tournaments in Natick. I’m not a good judge of ages, but I’d put him in the 6-8 year old range. Don’t laugh: Danny Angermeier, who is rapidly becoming one of the best players at the club, and I suspect will eventually be one of the best in the state, turned 10 last night…. This was sort of a strange little game, and I’m starting to think that a lot of these games that I’m going to be playing on the black side of the Modern Defense are going to look, well, not like your usual chess game. At least I got a win and broke my 3 game losing streak. Metrowest Chess Club regular and fellow chess blogger Blunderprone has recently put together an excellent series of posts detailing how he uses his own games as fuel for his study plans. Parts 1 through 4 are available at blunderprone.blogspot.com. They’re a great read both for technical details for how to accomplish some of these things in Chessbase and for ideas about crafting your own improvement plan. Continue reading Halls of Shame Chess study begins with tactics. There are many tactics books, both of the instructional variety (with a fair bit of text introducing tactical concepts like forks, pins, skewers, etc) and the workbook variety (page after page of problems). I have some of these, but more and more I find myself turning to the internet for tactical practice. Chess requires a few different abilities which all fall under the heading of “mental toughness.” Sometimes, the best move in a position undoes one of your prior moves (like moving a piece back to the square it was just on). It’s psychologically tough to do that, but the best move is the best move. Another is the ability to assess your opponents threats with a clear head and stick to your plan when his scary looking move isn’t really so scary. Neither of these came up this week, but another one did: the need to play the position and not force things that aren’t there. I have a bad habit of wanting to just blow things up when the position is boring. Sometimes there’s nothing much to do, you just have to play simple, quiet moves and maybe end up with a draw. I’m bad at this. When I can’t find a plan I tend to want to just fling pieces at the enemy king. My 21st move in this game is an example of a move like that, and it lost me the game (as these sorts of moves tend to). |
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