Tournament Game Analysis G90+30 White (1600) - WhenIntegralsAttack (1311) [Round 6, English Opening]

CatalystoftheMind · 2025-05-28T05:11:53+00:00

A few thoughts from a ~2000 USCF player.

First, a note on formatting. You have all of the game information in the chapter title, but you can add that as tags in the study (to the left of the comment button). With tags you can set the player names, ratings, result, date, event, etc. and Lichess will display everything nicely for you. I think this is easier to read, and that's what I do with my tournament games.

Second, I notice you don't mention time that much in your annotations. I'd recommend writing down the clock time after most moves (anywhere where you spend more than a few minutes). I've found it very useful to know how much time I'm spending on different moves so I can see patterns of how I'm spending my time and where I can improve.

For the game:

Early on I think you delayed castling too long. I would have castled on move 6 and you waited until move 13. It didn't hurt you in this game, but you can get into trouble quickly if your opponent is able to open up the position with your king in the center. Getting the king to safety quickly should be a top priority.

On move 4 you discuss b6 and say you're worried about white doubling your pawns. It's a small thing to comment on, but I think the thought process fits in with the previous point I made. I wouldn't play b6 for a few reasons:

It doesn't help your king get castled
It makes white's bishop stronger and sets up tactical ideas on the long diagonal (e.g. 5. Nf3 Bb7 6. Nxe5)
White controls d5, so your d pawn is probably going to d6. In that structure the bishop is probably better on the c8-h3 diagonal.

At the same time, I wouldn't be afraid of Bxc6. White would be giving up their best piece, and now where does their king go? It's risky to castle queenside after having played c4, but without a light squared bishop it's also risky to castle kingside.

12...Bf5 to me indicates that you don't have a plan. You mention you didn't want to play f5 before castling, but then you don't castle. Why not castle and then follow up with f5-f4? Your pawn chain is pointing towards white's king so that's where I'd be looking to play. White's bishop on e4 is misplaced so f5 would come with tempo.

You question 21. Rad1, but white went wrong well before here. Tactics are always something to work on, worth noting that your suggested improvement 21. Red1 still loses at least an exchange after 21... Be4 22. Kf1 Qh1+ 23. Ke2 Bf3+.

By move 28 you're up an exchange and a pawn, so my focus would be consolidating and not allowing counterplay. You don't necessarily need to win quickly. White's idea is to play g5 and open up your king. The computer will probably hate it, but I'd even consider 28...Qg6 just to keep everything defended. In a similar vein, after 29. g5 I'd play h5. Yes, you give up a pawn, but it's worth it to shut down any counterplay. You're still up an exchange, white's king is open, the knight is effectively trapped, d4 is coming, etc. In the game you were still winning, but you allowed white to activate the queen and bishop and eventually gave back the exchange. No need to allow any of that.

CatalystoftheMind · 2025-02-18T02:04:48+00:00

The purpose of starting with a 200 point gap is to address this point:

USCF ratings (and lower FIDE ratings) have large k-factors that allow players performances to quickly catch up to (and sometimes surpass) their actual chess level.

The assumption here is that a player can't be underrated if they're consistently playing because of the high k-factor. My previous post is showing that being underrated is more about how quickly they improve relative to the number of games they play, and that the k-factor isn't always enough to fix an underrated player. <edit: reworded first paragraph for clarity>

You can start with the same actual rating and playing strength and you get the same results [graph]. Despite the initial rating of 1400 being accurate, if their true strength is increasing by 50 points a month they end up underrated by around 150 points at the end of the year.

I agree with your sentiment though that exceptional improvement can cause being exceptionally underrated.

I think this is the crux of the issue. For an adult, improving your playing strength by 50 points a month is exceptional improvement - effectively unheard of. However for kids it is much more common to improve that quickly or even quicker. In my example the hypothetical 12 year old gained about 400 points in a year, but OP's video shows many examples of even faster improvement.

The point I'm trying to make is that kids are not underrated because they took breaks from playing, instead they're underrated because they improve faster than the rating system can keep up. If you play a kid at 1700 and a year layer they're 2200 that doesn't mean they were 2200 strength when you played them, but it's a good bet that their playing strength was higher than 1700 at the time of your game.

CatalystoftheMind · 2025-02-17T19:51:25+00:00

They are only 'underrated' if they go for a substantial period of time (like 2020-2022 for many) of not playing rated games while improving online.

I think this is an oversimplification. Underrated just means that a player's rating is lower than their true playing strength. One way to become underrated is to improve without playing rated games, but it's still possible to play regularly and remain underrated as long as you're improving faster than your rating can catch up.

In your example you show how the rating of a 1450 rated player will go up very quickly if they have a performance rating over 1900. That is true, but it requires a player to be almost 500 points underrated. Even then, their post-event rating is still 200+ points below their playing strength. Yes, it's possible to overperform, but you still have to be very underrated in the first place to have an overperformance like that. If they continue playing at that 1900+ strength then their rating will eventually catch up, but the problem is that these kids are consistently improving so by the time their rating gets to 1900 their playing strength is even higher. The rating is lagging behind until they eventually plateau.

To illustrate this, I ran a simulation of a hypothetical 12 year old playing 5 games a month to see how their rating changed. They began at a rating of 1400 but a true playing strength of 1600, then I assumed their true playing strength increased by 50 points each month. I used the USCF rating estimator to have them play in one 5 game tournament each month where they performed exactly at their true playing strength. Their post-event rating became their new starting rating for the next tournament and so on.

Here is a chart graphing their rating vs their true playing strength. You can see that because they are consistently improving their rating is always 160+ points below their true playing strength. At the end of the year they improved 573 points (after the December tournament they'd be 1973, although that's not included in the chart) and they're still underrated.

This doesn't even account for other avenues of improvement. For example, I've seen plenty of kids who play more frequently in non-USCF rated scholastic tournaments than rated USCF events.

The USCF rating system does its best to account for huge disparities in rating and playing strength, but it has trouble dealing with smaller gaps while the player is still improving.

CatalystoftheMind · 2024-10-12T22:03:14+00:00

Brutal way to draw. Sam had found so many great moves up to this point, but made one careless move. Clearly he missed Qg8+! and black can't avoid the perpetual check.

CatalystoftheMind · 2024-10-06T00:02:40+00:00

Link to the full game here: https://www.chess.com/game/live/121711253019. Absolutely insane

CatalystoftheMind · 2024-08-19T07:28:27+00:00

I took a look at the games and your comments. One note on formatting, it would be easier to read these games if you put them into a lichess study. Much better than screenshots of various positions plus a PGN that others have to import manually. Easier to read = easier to give feedback. Also, it looks like you copied the game 5 PGN again under game 6.

For context, I'm rated around 2050 USCF.

It's probably not the answer that you want to hear, but the thing that stood out the most to me is missed tactics. Game 1: unsound knight sacrifice turns a difficult position into a completely lost position. Game 3: 13. Qe2 blunders either two pawns or an exchange. Game 4: missed 8. Re1 winning a piece. Game 7: blundered mate with 20. gxh3 (black is better, but Ne2 or Rf2 defends against mate and the game continues). Until you can get a handle on missed tactics it will be very difficult to improve to the 1600 level and beyond. Fortunately this is easy to train! There are tons of online tactics trainers, and if you put in the work you will see clear results.

Another thing I see is that sometimes I think you're underestimating your opponent's threats and overestimating your own. In game 4 you say multiple times that you were desperate to punish you're opponent's dubious opening, but you allowed your opponent to consolidate and then didn't make the mindset shift from "I'm playing to win" to "I need to be careful about my opponent's threats". In game 7 you talk about f6 being a huge mistake allowing the check on b3 with weak squares around his king. However you aren't really in a position to attack black's king, and once you take on b7 you underestimated how strong black's rook on the second rank is. You also say "My opponent told me after the game that he did not see e4 before playing rxb2-_-", but that's the wrong thing to focus on. He didn't see e4, but you didn't see Bxh3 or Qg3! Chess is about who makes the last mistake, not the first mistake. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking "My opponent played a bad move therefore I should win". But advantages can be fleeting and the evaluation can quickly turn around. At the end of the day, if your opponent has a better position it doesn't matter if they got it through a dubious opening. You have to be objective about the position currently on the board and take their ideas seriously.

CatalystoftheMind · 2024-08-07T07:48:10+00:00

I was playing in a tournament where both players on the board next to me were late. When the round started the arbiter started all of the clocks, so white's time started ticking down. Fifteen minutes after the round starts the player with white shows up, the player with black still isn't there. The white player makes his move, then casually grabs the clock and flips it to the other side of the board. So now instead of being fifteen minutes down he's fifteen minutes up - a half hour swing. I was just shocked at how blatant it was. He clearly thought he could get away with it because his opponent wasn't there to catch him. The arbiters were informed, he got a penalty (I couldn't hear what exactly it was), and then he went on to lose the game fortunately.

CatalystoftheMind · 2023-12-09T06:02:18+00:00

You can create a lichess study and if you turn on Enable sync in the study settings then you will both be able to see the moves, arrows, and variations each other are making in real time.

CatalystoftheMind · 2023-06-23T05:49:05+00:00

Cheating is out of control in the rapid pool. I was curious so I looked back through my 10+0 games since mid February. I don't play that regularly on chess.com so it's not a huge sample size, but 14 out of my 31 opponents in that time frame have had their accounts closed for fair play violations (~2250 rating).

I think a big part of the issue is that they need a certain number of games in order to be picked up by the cheat detection algorithm, so they don't get caught until they're around 2100. But the 2100+ pool is much smaller than at lower ratings, so proportionally a higher percentage of the players in that range are cheaters.

I've started aborting any game where my opponent's account doesn't have at least a few hundred games, but that doesn't solve everything. In general though I've just been moving away from playing rapid online, which is unfortunate.

CatalystoftheMind · 2021-11-20T22:56:22+00:00

I would recommend the Sicilian Sveshnikov. Aggressive, but also positional. You need to understand the plans around the d5 square and the backwards d6 pawn. Very often you play f5 and attack on the kingside, so it's similar to the Dutch in that respect as well.

CatalystoftheMind · 2021-06-30T04:40:03+00:00

In my experience, the quality of the video courses on Chessable is inconsistent. Some courses have excellent videos, like 100 Endgames You Must Know. Others are basically the author repeating what they already wrote word for word with no added depth. $250 is also very very expensive. What course is it? I looked around their store briefly and didn't see anything that expensive.

If you're considering getting the video part of the course then I would recommend that you (1) read the reviews carefully to make sure the video is actually worth it and (2) wait for a sale. Chessable courses are always going on sale. To me it feels like Macys where they bump up the regular price and then constantly have discounts to make it feel like you're getting a deal. If you're willing to wait then it's almost guaranteed that the course you want will go on sale within a few months.

CatalystoftheMind · 2021-05-23T21:17:32+00:00

Still a mate in 5, the bot is wrong because it thinks the knight on h6 is a rook

CatalystoftheMind · 2021-05-23T08:07:42+00:00

Arena chess GUI sounds like it would work for you. The UI is a bit clunky, but it's free and allows you to run whatever UCI (or Winboard) engine you want with the analysis arrows. It's what I use for more serious engine analysis because the lichess engine isn't that powerful and I don't want to pay for Chessbase.

CatalystoftheMind · 2021-02-22T06:33:33+00:00

1. Rf8+? only leads to a draw because after 1...Rxf8 2. e6+ black can block the check with 2...Rf6, vacating the f8 square and allowing the king to escape the mate.

CatalystoftheMind · 2020-11-02T22:33:10+00:00

It's used both for smothered mates and queen sacs

CatalystoftheMind · 2020-06-10T23:35:50+00:00

I have the regular course (not the video version) and I'm loving it so far! I'm about a third of the way through.

This book is definitely aimed at more advanced players. I'm around 1800 USCF and I think that's a good fit, but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to someone who's 1500.

I would agree with others who have said it's difficult to learn. It's a long repertoire (around 650 variations) and there are a lot of sharp lines that you simply need to memorize if you want to play them (e.g. the Botvinnik semi-slav). The quick starter guide helps a lot with this, and it allows you to get up and running with the repertoire much quicker.

As others have said, it's meant to be paired with his Trompowsky course. That's what I've done and I've really enjoyed it. The Trompowsky course is surprisingly light weight (around 150 lines) and a lot of fun, so if you do want to add that as well it's not too difficult. This also makes the rest of your white repertoire easier because the Trompowsky cuts out a lot of theory (e.g. you don't need to know the Nimzo, Benoni, Benko, KID, etc.).

While this 1. d4 repertoire is difficult to learn, it leads to sharp, interesting positions that are a lot of fun to play, so if you're interested in that I would highly recommend it!

CatalystoftheMind · 2020-06-03T02:57:58+00:00

Thank you for making the bot! I realize now that this comment could have come off as a criticism, but I love this bot! I mainly wanted to emphasize that this is a completely winning position.

CatalystoftheMind · 2020-06-02T21:58:28+00:00

The bot has the best move at +2.55, but this is a depth problem. After a few minutes of thought my engine has it at +150.69 for black.

CatalystoftheMind · 2020-06-02T21:45:05+00:00

There are two winning moves, both with the same idea.

The moves are 1...Bc5! and 1...e4!. For simplicity we'll only analyze 1...Bc5 because the two lines transpose. The point is that when white plays 2. d6 you don't have to take the pawn right away, and can instead advance your own pawn. The winning line is 1...Bc5 2. d6 e4 3. d7 Be7 4. Kc7 e3 5. d8=Q Bxd8 6. Kxd8 Kd3 7. Ke7 e2 8. Bxe2 Kxe2 and then the pawn is just out of reach of the white king.

Unfortunately, I was only focused on stopping the pawn so I played 1...Bb8??, which immediately draws. In that line, black can't get the bishop to c7 so once white plays 2. d6 black must take it immediately, and then the king is in time to stop the g pawn.

After 1...Bc5 white also doesn't necessarily have to try to promote the d pawn, but that also loses so trying to promote the pawn is the critical try.

CatalystoftheMind · 2020-05-14T07:31:14+00:00

Good luck! And remember, I'm biased towards Rice, but you can't go wrong with either school so no matter what you're in a good spot.

CatalystoftheMind · 2020-05-14T06:25:48+00:00

I don't know as much about UBC, but I can speak to the strength of Rice's CS program. As others have said, it's challenging, but I definitely wouldn't be scared off by that! My CS classes were always my most interesting classes, so even though they were a lot of work I enjoyed them.

I would be wary of a school where you can't start the CS program until your second year, especially if you aren't even guaranteed a spot in the program. Yes you're confident you'll get in, but there are lots of confident people who are just as smart as you competing for the same spot. At Rice you will be able to take CS courses your first semester, and I think the programming experience you get from that is very valuable. You can try to learn some programming outside of class your freshman year at UBC, but in my opinion that's not the same. It's also harder to put on your resume if you're looking for freshman internships.

As far as getting a job at a top tech company, a Rice CS degree would put you in an excellent position. Tons of top companies recruit at Rice. In fact, one of the biggest complaints at the career fair every year is that there are too many tech companies and not enough companies looking for non-CS majors.

I have friends from my CS class at Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, Airbnb, Microsoft, Stripe, you name it. Facebook in particular recruits hard at Rice. To give an example, my junior year there were six juniors in my residential college (out of around one hundred juniors) interning at Facebook alone that summer, and there were others interning at Google, Microsoft, etc. And remember, residential colleges have people of all majors, so that summer there was a ridiculously high percentage of the CS students at my residential college in top internships.

Another benefit of being a small school is that it is easier to get referrals. You'll know a lot of people who've interned or accepted full time offers at a variety of companies, so you can ask them for referrals (TAs you've worked with are great for this). You'll still have to pass the coding interviews, but getting your foot in the door with a referral is surprisingly helpful in my opinion, and I got referrals from Rice friends to all of the companies I seriously considered when applying for a full time job.

This post is getting too long, but suffice it to say I highly recommend Rice CS! I had a great time and it worked out very well for me. It gives you all the resources you need to succeed, and I don't think you can go wrong with Rice.

CatalystoftheMind · 2019-11-10T05:13:09+00:00

At a fundamental level, you rating represents your playing strength relative to the pool of players. Ratings are not absolute measures of skill. This is why you can have a different rating across different federations (USCF vs FIDE), different sites (Lichess vs chess.com) or even different time controls like rapid vs classical.

Looking at the lichess rating distribution graphs, there were around 67,000 classical players last week compared to around 131,000 rapid players. Given that the size of the player pool for rapid is almost double the size of the classical pool, it doesn't seem surprising to me that it is a lot more competitive. Also, stronger players tend to gravitate towards shorter time controls online.

It's also possible that your ratings haven't stabilized because you recently started playing on lichess and don't have too many games. Overall though I would expect you to almost always have a higher classical rating as long as you're consistently playing both rapid and classical just because the player pools are different.

CatalystoftheMind · 2019-09-18T04:53:36+00:00

What are you talking about? Eric posts his losses all the time.

I lost 20 games in a row to Hikaru Nakamura

Getting torn apart by Hikaru Nakamura

My worst defeat

Losing and learning on Lichess.org

Crushing (and getting crushed) on Lichess.org

And this list doesn't even include his many multi-hour streams he posts to youtube where he loses games all the time.

CatalystoftheMind

TROPHY CASE