Friday 22 July 2011

How to beat a Grandmaster

In today’s post our club’s top rated player, Matthew Parsons, shows us how he beat his first Grandmaster recently on the Playchess website.

“Blitz Chess is certainly not classical chess, but beating a GM is no less hard. First off you better make sure you have a decent mouse, as you don’t want a mouse slip spoiling it all just about when you are to deliver checkmate! Blitz players are not understanding and will not give take-backs.

I was really pleased recently when I was able to beat a GM for the first time on playchess. In round 1 of a Wednesday night blitz tournament, I beat GM Jakob Meister, FIDE 2494, whose playchess rating at the start of the game was 2568, mine being 1889. 1889 is a bit low for me, I’m normally in the mid-1900‘s, with my highest grade being around 2042.

Now I’ve beaten plenty of FM’s on the server, drawing with and beating a few IM’s, but I have never gotten anything off a GM. Intriguingly enough I had been drawn against this same opponent a few times in recent tournaments in the 1st round, and we had had some close games, but he had won them all.

There’s no secret to beating players of this level. Good chess is good chess, and whilst I knew I couldn’t match him on classical play, I thought I could really narrow the difference in ability by doing my best to unbalance the position and force him to think rather than just playing on a GM’s pattern recognition and experience. After all, we only had 3mins each on the clock, if I could just get an advantage...”




Thanks to Matthew for taking the time to send us this interesting game and annotations.

7 comments:

Pete said...

OK, why can't I see the games? There's just a white rectangle. java.com confirms that I have the latest version of Java installed.

I had, previously, been able to see the games in your Like the View? post and now it, too, is blank. What has changed at your end since I read that post?

Intermezzo said...

Nothing has changed Pete. Same viewer. Maybe just a glitch with your machine. Try again and see if it works. I seem to be a bit hit and miss with it myself.
maybe this viewer is not so good after all. It needs to be stable.

Pete said...

It's no better this morning, on the netbook. I'll try later on another computer.

Good luck next week!

Intermezzo said...

Thanks Pete. When it was working before was that on another machine? Home computer rather than the net book? Were you connected wirelessly? I wonder if this could be a laptop issue... Thanks for the feedback, I'll follow up.

Pete said...

A mystery! Without changing anything, restarting the machine, or whatever, I returned to this tab and, lo and behold, Matt's game was there! No, it was previously working on this machine, a couple of weeks ago. Yes, it is connected wirelessly; they all are.

BTW, on the Review of the Year round 4 games, I see the following Warning: "This games PGN data does not meet the Seven Tag Roster requirement for mandatory set of tags." This doesn't stop me from playing the game and vanishes when I click to make the first move.

Pete said...

And it's blank again (same netbook) this morning! I'll see whether it appears later, again without intervention from me. At least it stops me spending time going through the games, but I enjoy doing that!

Nick said...

No problems here either Pete, although I had to wait a while for it to come up. How long did you wait?