Tournament blues

I played an OTB tournament recently and from an objective perspective did fairly well. I was in the reserve section so I was among the top-rated players in the section. In the first three rounds I was paired against players rated lower than I was, and I managed to win all three games without a great deal of trouble (my first opponent was rated below 400 and that game was not competitive, but the other two were decent enough). I would have won the section if I had managed to win my last game against an opponent rated just slightly higher than me, but I lost. If you've followed this blog long enough to have seen my OTB tournament record that I discussed here you know that I've only managed to win one game against any player rated 1200 or higher since the 1990s, and the pattern held true once again; my opponent for the last round was rated 1277.

I don't know why I can't seem to win these games. In this case I was better, even winning, for most of the game. I was trying to figure out how to press my advantage when I blundered the Exchange, one of the few significant tactical errors I made all day. My position was so good that even after making the blunder I was still better, and I was pretty confident at that point. But because I was now behind in material I had to be very careful because if everything just ended up getting traded off I would lose. Up to that point my clock had not been a concern but now I started eating up clock time (the time control was G60 d/5). It looked to me like there had to be a winning breakthrough somewhere and all I needed to do was find it. I looked, and looked, and looked and couldn't find anything (later computer analysis of course showed there was one). By the time I decided that either there was no breakthrough to be found or at least that I wasn't going to find it, I was mired in my old bugaboo: time trouble.

I went into the endgame with a decent enough position on the board; I was probably still winning despite the material deficit because I had an advanced passed pawn threatening to promote. But I had only a minute or two remaining plus the 5-second delay (not increment) while my opponent had about 20 minutes left. If the game had been trivially won by that point then that would not have been a big deal, but there was still a lot of work that needed to be done. I didn't have any time left to think; I was soon moving basically instantly to avoid a forfeit. Under these conditions I made several horrible errors, including trading the last set of rooks into a losing king-and-pawns endgame. I finally resigned at about the same moment as my clock ran out.

If it hadn't been for the time trouble I'm confident that I would have got at least a draw out of the game, and there was a good chance I would have won. But it seems like that's what I'm saying after all of my losses: if only; if it weren't for. I'm tired of having to say that I could have won, would have won, should have won. I want to say I won. It always seems to be right there within reach, but I can't grab it.

One of the things that's so aggravating about tournament chess is that as I said above, I played really well for most of the day. I beat three opponents, and yes I was favored in all of those games but I did win them and played well. I even played pretty well for much of the last game that I lost. After the tournament was over, though, none of that mattered. The only thing that mattered was that I had a chance to go undefeated and win the section by winning the last game and couldn't do it.

Ratings are responsible for a lot of this feeling. You size up your opponents by rating, so if you're able to win you only consider it much of an accomplishment if they have a rating as high or higher than yours. Otherwise you feel like you ought to win anyway and it's nothing to crow about. I've discussed ratings before, particularly in the blog post I linked to above. Regarding the great disparity between my predicted OTB rating based on my online ratings and my actual OTB rating, I've decided the predicted rating is just wrong. As I suggested in the linked blog post, there is reason to think that at least at Class D level where I dwell there's been significant rating deflation in the last few decades, and the fact that my performance has apparently declined over that time is just an illusion.

There's no sense worrying about what my OTB rating should be based on my online performance anyway. Different ratings at different online sites and different time controls only measure performance within the restrictions they're set up for. People perform differently under different conditions, even similar conditions. All rating systems are only valid and predictive within their own environment.

At least that's what I tell myself when my results don't measure up to what I think they should be. It ought to be enough that I played well and had a good time playing chess all day. It ought to. That's what I tell myself. Do I sound like I feel better? Yeah, I didn't think so.