What I’m learning from our games is that the Smith Morra, once accepted, is impossible to beat.
I have to say, I am really enjoying Daniel Naroditsky’s youtube series with his smurf account. Unlike other smurf accounts, he explains everything in great detail for why the opponent is doing a particular move and why he is making his moves.
Is it weird that I play much better on Blitz OTB (5 min with 5 sec increment)? I’ve only been doing OTB play for about 2 months now. Held my own against a guy (played Smith Morra as White and Anti-English as Black against someone rated 1,800 on Blitz in Lichess). When I told him my chess dot com blitz rating, he said something doesn’t add up.
I notice I don’t make as many blunders OTB compared to online.
Edit: Also did beat a 1,300 USCF rated player in 20 minute Rapid.
Lichess ratings are a little inflated. I’m 1805 blitz on lichess and 1571 blitz on chess dot com.
It’s also possible you’re better than your rating says as you continue to study and improve.
I’m like 1780 USCF standard, 1500 USCF rapid, 1750 chessdotcom daily, 1400 chessdotcom blitz, 1200 chessdotcom bullet. I prefer the 2hr for 40 moves + 60min time controls. I guess I don’t think fast.
I’ve played probably less than 20 OTB games in my life and never used a clock before. But have over 4000 games played online.
I’m curious if others here are similar, or do most of you have experience OTB and now just play online for convenience?
It’s so weird cause I don’t feel the time pressure as much playing OTB and I like the idea of pressing a chess clock. Maybe it’s cause I’m playing at a board-game inspired bar where I’m more relaxed, compared to playing online and ratings points are at stake lol.
I haven’t played a USCF rated event since I had… 3 months of chess experience (I want to remedy this in 2022).
I peaked at 2440 lichess blitz in early 2020, and at the same time I peaked at 2200 chess.com blitz and just over 2000 on ICC. It’s generally inevitable in an Elo or Glicko rating system for rating inflation to occur as the player body expands. I remember when Nakamura peaked at 3750 blitz on ICC over 10 years ago from taking advantage of bots (he’d win on time when playing a ridiculously defensive setup).
Different sites are generally not directly comparable (different player pools, if one player pool is overall better, the comparable ratings will generally be lower), but if someone is a better player, they should generally be higher rated than a weaker player regardless of site.
chess.com starts new players at 1200 and lichess at 1500. There’s part of the bias up. 1525 is the median blitz rating of active players at lichess. The mean at chess.com is 819. That surprises me a bit. I wonder if that includes a lot of inactive accounts who picked up the game, struggled, and quit. This game has a steep learning curve, but I’d expect the average active player to be up in the 1200 range.
Or started with a new username to jump back up to 1200
I believe they changed this recently to allow players to start at 800, 1200, 1500, or 1800 depending on what level they say they are when they start.
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My ongoing game with @procrastinator (mizizark) is one of the most unique I’ve played. I have Queen, Rook, Bishop, and 4 isolated pawns vs 2 Rooks, 2 Knights, and 5 pawns. Which turns out to be equal material value.
Yeah, I have a hard time finding a happy medium between trying to make 3 moves a day on 5 games, and forgetting its my turn and timing out after 3 days.
- I’ve been one bad move away from 2600 a couple times I believe.
Wow what a game…that’s gotta be demoralizing for Nepo.
Amazing game. Very tense throughout. I’ve enjoyed watching the Anand-Muzychuk stream (FIDE official one) that doesn’t have an eval bar, as for me the eval bar hovering around 0 the whole time artificially takes away the life in the position.
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I watched the official chessdotcom one today, it’s okay, Fabi is pretty boring and kinda awkward but he is really good at chess lol. Maybe I’ll watch Hikaru tomorrow
I always love piece imbalance games.
Question, if Magnus didn’t have the knight and it was just a king and queen vs king and rook and 2 pawns, would that likely be a theoretical draw or a win for Nepo?
Draw most likely because of the gazillion checks the queen can give. Today’s game even with the knight was a theoretical draw for most of it, but the knight is very important as a defender because it blocks so many checks