At the start of the season, I challenged myself to enjoy chess more, by giving up online blitz and the spreadsheets. Worrying what your grading performance is after every game can't be a good thing (hence I also dropped the idea of targets) but it must be helpful to review afterwards, and so there is still a place for the good old numbers overload.
However, I've tried to do something different this time, for I do realise that reading most of my stats posts is rather like wading through treacle. Partly too, the overhaul came about when I noticed that some of the figures didn't match up with my expectations. So this time, I'm offering some surprising facts in a more bite-sized form. Once again, I am only looking at slowplay games, which in any case are all that this blog now concerns itself with. For juniors, the figures used in this post are my guesstimates of their new grades (ie: what goes into my calculation) without the increment. With that...
I played games with black too this time. In the second half of last season, I lifted myself up to the mid-160s largely by playing 20 games with white and only 10 with black. This time things were more balanced: 13 whites (+7 =4 -2 at 174.5) and 14 blacks (+3 =4 -7 at 153.6). That meant my usual slight plus score was maintained, and the overall black performance doesn't look quite as bad as normal.
But I still can't play as black. Despite the above, I was still dependent on my whites, especially the staple diet of Sicilian, French and Ruy Lopez games (+6 =2 -1 at 178.1). Though the headline black performance is OK, my performances with the Sicilian (153) and KID (138) are virtually identical to the second half of last season. The difference is that I played 7 Sicilians and only 3 KIDs, so the latter has relatively little impact. The overall scores as white and black almost mirror each other, which is a fair reflection of how schizophrenic a player I can be.
I am becoming less drawish! Yes, honestly! The proportion of draws fell (8/27 from 10/30), the frequency of offers fell (0.51/game from 0.57), my share of the offers fell (6/14 from 9/17) and my acceptance frequency fell (2/8 from 5/8). My run in the Bristol League really obscures what has been quite a pugilistic half-season all told, and that leads me onto the next point...
Leagues and congresses are totally different. Different both by performance and the way I got there: in leagues I scored +2 =6 -0 for 178, and in congresses +8 =2 -9 for 157.6. It's encouraging that, just like games with white, this time I didn't need a lot of league games to have a good performance overall. And it looks like I was right all along that tournament play is a lot more bloodthirsty! I think it is worth acknowledging this difference in my play, as I will explain in the other half of my review.
Playing at CCF harms your grade. It turns out that this is a long-running trend. Since the first half of 2012-13 my six-monthly performances there have been 157, 140, 157, 155, 150. Elsewhere I performed at 168, 163, 154, 169, 172 in the same time-frame. No wonder my FIDE rating is so deflated when most of my rated games are played there! In particular, every year I bomb the Jessie Gilbert Festival (142, 143 and 149 successively) and the Easter Congress (143 and 140), and together these make up a lot of games!
My strengths abandoned me. That is, my score against lower-graded players was unimpressive (+7 =4 -3 at 149.2) and I was so-so in games of under 30 moves (+0 =5 -2 at 159.9). True, if I hadn't self-destructed against Anilkumar and Crouch, the lower-grade figure would look a lot better, and I was lucky to win a lot of games with preparation last season, but it's quite a change. My strong finish to the season in two weekend open tournaments further suggests that being the underdog is a good thing.
My grade will flatline - but I can be optimistic. With the junior estimates put in, I have calculated my overall performance as 163.6; since all games from the last 12 months now go into even the most active grades, I predict that my grade will stay at 164 or go down by a point. (If X grades still existed, the countback would give me 166! Alas...) It's funny, since you wouldn't predict based on my start or finish to the grading period. Despite the ostensible lack of progress, I am optimistic: over the most recent 19 games I performed at 172, and as I will explain in the next post I feel that I made some important steps forward.
Well, there we are. That wasn't so difficult, was it? There's some interesting stuff in there: in particular, I had thought that my black performance would be much lower, and I doubt I was alone in thinking I was drawing more games than before, not less. Apparently the solution is to play lots of congress chess! The CCF figures are interesting; maybe it is because of my historic under-performance in congresses, but it is true that the playing pool there is quite isolated. It seems rather too cruel to immediately stop playing there at all for the sake of 10 or so grading points, but it is worth bearing in mind.
Nevertheless, I think that coverage of the more subjective aspects of the grading period will be more illuminating - but I'll find out when I write that post! Like last year, I will try to offer some ideas for a wider audience than just me.
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