2021 Year in Review

Every year I like to make a little wrap-up of my progress (or lack thereof) in slow time-control games and provide a few thoughts. This is mostly of interest only to myself, and if you want to skip this edition of the blog I don't blame you. For those who hang around, I'll go over a few things.

I'm counting only games with at least 30 minutes per side. Most of them were longer than that, but that's the minimum for inclusion. Other than that limitation, almost any game counted. Almost all the games are internet games and it didn't matter if the opponent's rating was provisional or if I was playing against a computer (although I don't think I played any games against computers this year) or if one of the players disconnected or was later dinged for cheating. It would have been too much work and too subjective if I went back through all the games and decided that this game counts but this other one doesn't. It's the same way I did this last year so at least it has the advantage of consistency.

First, here are the number of games played and on what servers, along with a comparison to 2020:

I was surprised that I played nearly as many games in 2021 as I did in 2020, considering that in in 2020 there was a period of about two months when everything was shut down and I didn't go in to work. I remember reading a few years ago Dan Heisman saying that to expect improvement you have to play a hundred serious, slow time control games a year. At the time, that seemed impossible for anybody with any other obligations, but apparently not--not even in a year where you're not homebound for two months straight.

Most of my games are played on Lichess. That's not by design, it's just the place I've found games the fastest at classical time controls. Accordingly I used my Lichess results for the statistics against opponents at different rating levels since ratings can be wildly different on different sites. Here are 2021's results and a look back at 2020's. As usual keep in mind that I list results in the order Wins-Draws-Losses:

Wow, looking at that record I'm sort of shocked that I've been able to maintain my rating at pretty much the same level as I started the year. I intentionally played opponents who were mostly stronger than me, but even so, I'm getting crushed at every level. I guess I balanced it out a little by beating an occasional opponent over 2100, but the near-complete reversal of my results against similarly-rated opponents in the 1900-1999 range is quite disheartening.

Even before seeing the numbers I didn't feel like I improved in 2021. I made a big leap forward in 2020 and my Lichess rating reflected that, but this year it took a big decline early on that I spent the rest of the year trying to reverse. By the end of the year I ended up about where I started rating-wise, at least on Lichess. But that's a lot of losses to deal with.

It was offset somewhat by a big increase in my rating at Chess.com, but I think all that was happening was that my rating there was taking longer to reflect my true playing level because I don't play as many games there. I also recently got a big undeserved win against an opponent rated about 500 points higher than me when he disconnected in an easily winning position, so right now my Chess.com rating is somewhat higher than my actual strength. Even so, it's nice to win every once in a while and it isn't happening very much on Lichess.

Looking at my comments at the same time last year, I have pretty much the same problems now that I did then: too many blunders, and time trouble. In the last few weeks I've started playing some rapid games, mainly 25/15, with the idea that I've got to learn to make most of my moves faster so I'm not running my clock dangerously low all the time. I've resisted this up to now, as I was afraid that it might get me into the bad habit of only looking superficially into positions that in slower games require deeper calculation. It's a danger but I think I'll have to take that risk. As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, another thing that I started doing this past year was reviewing all my games without the help of a computer engine the first time around, and then consulting the engine afterwards. I haven't seen any gains from this so far but I probably haven't been doing it long enough to expect to see any changes yet.

So I'll review again in a year and see if any of this makes any difference. If it doesn't then I may have to start playing weaker opponents so I can win more often. I have a pretty high tolerance for losing as long as I think tough opposition is making me stronger, but if I'm just losing and not improving there are limits to the number of losses I can take.