Epic Collapse

If you've ever commuted to work on a busy interstate highway you're familiar with the phenomenon of rubbernecking, which is when drivers slow down so they can see the results of an earlier vehicle crash. Traffic backs up even when the road is not blocked because everybody wants to see what's left of the disaster, and everybody ends up late for work because of the traffic jam. We seem to be hard-wired to want to see spectacular disasters, even as we insist that such things are unpleasant. Even if it's a planned event rather than an accident, watching a building or other large structure like a bridge collapse is compelling viewing. Similarly, as the Dan Heisman quote above references there's a certain entertainment value in watching a perfectly good chess position fall apart, as long as the position wasn't yours.

Which brings me to the subject of this installment of the blog. I played an OTB tournament game this summer where the position was mine. It happened in the last round, and I had lost every game up to that point. Finally I had a game where I was playing well, and it looked like I was certain to at least tally one point for the tournament, and then--well, you'll see. When this happens to you, the only upside is if you write a chess blog you can provide your readers some ammunition they can use to laugh at you.

Ouch. What a day. Not only did I lose every game in that tournament, but none of my opponents had any other wins; the only player they were able to beat was me.

My opponent was astonished at his win and couldn't believe that he had somehow escaped. After losing a game this way it is difficult not to just run off somewhere and scream or hit something, but I tried to be gracious and talked to my opponent afterward. I'm glad I did. It turned out that he lived in the same town as me (not where the game was played) and he and some other players at about the same skill level met every weeknight at a local bar to play chess, and he asked me if I'd like to come. A week or two later I did, and I've been there nearly every week since.

So there was a happy ending to the story, sort of. At these informal chess meetings I've played my opponent in about a half-dozen friendly games and I've won every game. We don't use a clock and I don't drink while he usually does which gives me a leg up in our games, but even in a timed classical game and both players sober I'm a little bit better than him. But I couldn't beat him in an official game when it counted, which seems to be the way my OTB tournaments often go.

People who read this blog regularly know that time trouble and its accompanying blunders have been responsible for many of my OTB losses. The only thing that was unusual about this one was the magnitude of the collapse. Since the time it happened I had believed that it was the worst, most epic collapse that I had ever made in an OTB tournament game, but in preparing this blog post I dug up the game that I had thought had been the worst before that, and discovered that in fact the previous loss had been even worse. I didn't bother entering a bunch of annotations for it, but I'll post it here anyway.

Thirty-one moves of blunder-free chess in that game and an easily winning position, until I realized my clock was almost out and I cranked out four consecutive blunders, going from a computer evaluation of about a nine-pawn advantage to being mated in just four moves. Yep, that collapse was even worse.

I'm learning to accept that I'm a decent enough player when I play very carefully and deliberately, but if I have to go fast my natural instinct is to find the worst possible move. Therefore I play slowly, get good positions a lot and then run out of time or blunder the position away. The way I try to frame this in my own mind to make myself feel better is that I don't have much talent for the game but I squeeze every drop of juice I can out of whatever little talent I do have by being very careful and using all assets available, including every bit of time I have. Unfortunately if I haven't won the game by the time my clock gets low, I get results like the above.