The most optimistic indicator for my continued chess improvement is how dumb my moves are, currently

Annotations from a recent tournament

I beat a 2079-rated 12-year-old at a tournament at Charlotte Chess Center last weekend. It’s the second-highest-rated opponent I’ve ever beaten¹, and the second expert I’ve beaten in two months. So, I’m celebrating a little bit. But also feeling pretty dumb, after the move I made in this positon.

This is a theoretical line in the Tarrasch French where white sacrifices a pawn for a kingside attack. Nc5 was the first move that’s not in my prep; Qc5 is the only move I know there. It offers a queen trade, which is a sensible thing for black to do, since they’re up a pawn.

It turns out Nc5 is also a fine move. But I thought it was inaccurate, because white often wants to play a3 and b4 to control the c5 square in this structure, and now, I thought, both of those pawn pushes are coming with tempo. So after thinking for six minutes, I played a3.

I completely failed to consider the response Qb3.

Luckily, it didn’t lose the game for me, because I have the response Bxh7, and now if there’s a queen trade I’m not down a pawn anymore. But failing to consider white’s most obvious response was a pretty big failure.

After losing to a 15-year-old NM in round 2, I played a 13-year-old expert in round 3 (kids these days are good at chess, if you haven’t heard). We reached this position:

I got a similar structure in an online blitz game several months ago, which I remember because it’s on one of my 1,307 Anki flash cards, and postgame engine analysis revealed that the best plan was not to recapture the pawn on e5, but to play d5 and make the g7 bishop sad. So I played c4 and, after Qd6, d5.

Unfortunately, that does not work in this position. Pushing the c-pawn to c4 had weakened the d4 square, and now black plays Nd4, and after Nxd4 exd4, I’m down a pawn with little or no compensation. I failed to anticipate any part of this sequence. I went on to lose this game.

(By the way, despite the e5 pawn having three attackers and three defenders in the original position, there is a way for white to recapture it. If you’re interested, you can probably figure it out, but it’s not particularly relevant to me, because I did not want to recapture the pawn.)

So, how do these stupid blunders make me feel? Pretty good, actually. My USCF rating has gone up by about 300 points in the past two years, despite having these weird blind spots in my calculation. Imagine what can happen if I fix these highly-fixable problems!

1. 20 years ago, when my rating was in the 1500s, I won a game on time against a 2090 after he got lost on the way back from lunch and started the game with 30 minutes on his clock to my 60.