Looking backwards and looking forwards

On the surface, it looks like a year of stagnation, in that my ECF rating is about the same as it was this time last year. Actually it's a few points higher, 1834 now vs 1804 this time last year but I have a couple of recent losses that haven't made it into the ratings database yet that will probably wipe out that difference.

However, I do think there are signs of progress. I had a very good Ilkley tournament over the summer, scoring 4/5 for 2nd place in the Major (U1950) with a performance rating of 1934 and a couple of wins I'm very pleased with. I also persuaded my clubmates to enter the 4NCL on-line league which was a lot of fun, we got promoted out of Div 5 in our first season (Jan-April), albeit with a bit of luck, and then survived the tougher Div 4 in the Sept-Dec season just ended, again with a bit of luck! I (and one other club mate) additionally played in the 4NCL online congresses for individuals. Didn't do that well but have been enjoying the experience of a few more regular rated games as our club matches are fairly sparse and there haven't been many local congresses (I'm not sufficiently devoted to drive across the country and spend a weekend in a hotel etc).

I had a particularly poor November, going on a huge tilt and losing about 6 classical games in a row (both online and OTB). Now, these were mostly against stronger players (some much higher rated) but they mostly involved some pretty horrific blunders. Of course on one level this is very disappointing. On the the other hand, I did achieve winning positions (at least +1.5 and mostly +3 according to the engine) against all of these high rated opponents which suggests that if I can minimise some of my worst errors, I should be able to see some improvements.

After all those November losses, I was motivated to do a bit of a blunder audit which has proved very enlightening. Simply put, most of my blunders come when I'm either surprised/flustered by my opponent's move, or just snap out a move that looks fairly obvious without bothering to check it. The most spectacular of these was a recent 4NCL game when I had two possible king moves to get out of check;

one of which would surely have resulted in a win against a WFM but I only saw the other move and played it instantly, which led to mate in two! Sometimes the blunder is "following a bad move with a worse one" but oftentimes it's just that I didn't expect my opponent's move or even that I had expected it, but not fully anticipated the position that arose on the board. A good example of that was in my most recent OTB game where I had calculated my opponent's Nxg6 a few moves back:

Taking the knight would allow perpetual checks so I had planned Kf7 to dodge the discovered checks, and only realised when he put the knight down on the board that it was attacking my Rf8. There was a very straightforward reply that would have pretty much ended the game on the spot (after Rf7 I'm a rook up and he has no threats), but I missed it completely and played Kf7 anyway (giving back the exchange, leaving me just up a bishop) which made the win a lot harder work than it needed to be. Luckily, I got away with that one.

Thanks to this conspicuous evidence that I already play quite soundly in a strategic sense but lose games due to stupid mistakes, I'm trying to rebalance my study between skills and knowledge. Until recently I've been automatically drawn to the latter. It seemed to me last year that I would benefit from having more/better knowledge about strategy and therefore I waded through a number of strategy-oriented books such as"Techniques of positional play" and "300 Positions you must know" etc and created a set of Anki flashcards based on the priyomes contained within. I've now got over 1000 cards, which contain a wealth of interesting and important ideas. However in reality my losses are not due to getting saddled with a weak pawn structure or bad bishop but are almost entirely due to horrible blunders that require no strategic insight. (I suspect most chess players would say the same.) So perhaps I don't really need more knowledge, what I really need is to apply the knowledge I have.

A couple of recent podcasts have emphasised this for me, particularly Can Kabadayi's Chess Cognition podcasts interviews with people such as Solveig Friberg ("Rookie Redhead") and Aiden Rayner ("Don't move until you see it"). I'm not sure why I have previously had such a knowledge bias - perhaps it's because I think of myself as clever and good at learning stuff, but in my professional life all of my research and growth has been based around getting my hands dirty metaphorically speaking and thinking up (and coding up) solutions to computational and scientific problems. I have of course learnt a lot from reading scientific papers but the real improvement in my own capability comes from the work that goes into writing my own.

Therefore over the last couple of months I've been spending more time on two areas. Firstly, I've been looking for opportunities to play more under quasi-match conditions, and have started sparring seriously with various engines. My favourite is the Fairy-Stockfish AI on Lichess, which has a decent opening book, and makes some quite plausible errors at the weaker levels. I feel like I've mostly got the measure of it on Level 6, though it still punishes obvious blunders. Level 7 is tough but I've had a few draws (and definitely missed some winning chances), and the top Level 8 I am yet to hold out against for a full game but can usually play competitively against for a while and have even had a couple of good winning chances. The Komodo-based bots on chess.com are very much poorer training in comparison, with crazy openings and stupid blunders right up to the highest levels.

And secondly, I've also been doing more visualisation/cognition practice. Blindfold puzzles etc. Chessvis.com has a nice feature where you get a position, then have to play out N moves in your head, and solve the resulting problem. I've certainly been getting better at that, so hope it will feed through into real results.

On the optimistic side, I really enjoyed my last 4NCL game early in December:

While my opponent was significantly lower rated and made a couple of mistakes, I was pleased with my ability to formulate a valid strategic plan and execute it accurately.

The online 4NCL is going to restart in a couple of weeks, and there are also a number of new weekend congresses being set up locally (including Bradford in Jan which I've just entered). So I'm hoping to fit in a few more games this year. Last year I think I played about 40 rated games, a bit more online than OTB. This year I should go past 50.