No thanks

The last few editions of the blog have been a bit depressing so I was hesitant to do another one like that, but sometimes the material I have to work with gives me little choice if I intend the blog to be partly a chronicle of my own chess journey.

Even in blitz games blunders can be infuriating. They can include not only "defensive" errors, where you hang a piece or allow your opponent a simple two-move tactic but also "offensive" errors where your opponent makes a similar mistake but you don't take advantage of it. Without actually doing a survey of all of my blunders (and that would take a long time) there's no way to know for sure but I struggle with offensive errors a lot more than defensive errors, which seems to be a less common problem according to what I read.

Here are a couple of examples from yesterday's blitz session. After my first game, where I had my opponent on the ropes and had a (long) forced checkmate sequence which I didn't see and subsequently lost, I played the following game and got the following position:

Here I would win Black's queen with 9. Bb5. Think I noticed? Of course not. I've seen this pattern before, too, which is why this type of thing is so frustrating. What's the point of trying to learn these patterns when you don't notice them when you're actually playing? Strong players and instructors have to be baffled when they run across students like myself, who have learned this pattern and then have the opponent play right into it, only to fail to notice the opportunity to apply what they have learned. As Ben Finegold has lamented about his students, "Why do you pay me to teach you things and then you just ignore what I tell you?"

I lost that game, and then immediately played another offensive blunder in the following game:

Black has mate in one with 23. ... Ne4 mate. Needless to say I didn't notice, played something else and lost. That's two games in a row where I snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

Those were blitz games, and crazy stuff often happens in blitz games. As much as it drives me nuts to miss obvious things like this, at least I have the excuse that I didn't have time to check everything, and it's my poor instincts and pattern recognition that are responsible. I work on those things--quite a lot--but it could be that at my age (52) it's very difficult to improve them.

The problem is, I'm quite capable of making similar errors even when I have plenty of time. Here's a rapid game that I played just the other day:

White has just hung his e-pawn. Despite taking more than a minute and a half on my move I never noticed I could just take it with 12. ... Rxe5. One second after I moved, of course, then I noticed.

I think part of what's going on here is that I don't expect my opponent to hang pieces or allow mate in one, so I don't look for it. Even so, in a rapid or classical game whenever I make a bad tactical error my opponents do not seem to suffer from the same blind spot. And these errors are so obvious that I should be able to see them without specifically looking for them.

Not to be an alarmist about this, but it seems like the incidence of blunders like this in my games is increasing. I'm missing things that a year ago I was noticing. Cognitive decline can't be that severe over one year, can it? I'm 52, not 82. I should still have a few years with a brain that works well enough to play well at my low level, shouldn't I?

This is what happens when you get older. When you can't find your keys or walk into a room and can't remember why you went in there, or miss obvious one-move tactics, you wonder if this is the beginning of the end. Maybe all your study and tactics exercises will at best slow your inevitable decline and it's just wishful thinking that you might actually get better.

I sure hope not. But take a look at those blunders. Ugh.