It's over! At last, I'm a student no more, though it hasn't really sunk in yet. I feel relief more than anything, for it has felt like an ordeal this year; I've been counting down the weeks for a long time. 15 hours' academic reading each week is unremitting tedium, my hopes of a first hang in the balance, and I have had to pinch the pennies - the strain has started to take its toll. But, to stay on topic, what of my chess in the last 3 years?
William Hartston remarked that "chess doesn't drive people mad - it keeps mad people sane" and I have come to agree with that entirely: it has been vital to have something to get distracted by. Now it can take centre stage for a while, as I lurk in Bristol for a couple of months until my graduation. As advertised, I'm going to be working on endgames. Since I won't be playing much for a few months (apart from the Downend Summer Quickplay starting in late June), it will be the focus of my blogging: I'm going to try and turn it into a discussion/case study of how to work on one's weaknesses. I'm a big believer that the first step to solving any problem is to draw up a massive spreadsheet, so for the first post in this series, I'm going to throw some stats around.
I came to Bristol with a grade of 149, so it's not bad to leave with a 6-month performance of 174. But if I had converted every winning endgame since January, that would have been 198!* Endings have cost me 4 points from 17, the difference between a good half and an extraordinary one. The problem is actually getting worse, for usually I 'only' drop 2-3 points over 30 games and offset that with a swindle somewhere. But what is the problem?
In my view the endgame consists of two parts - perhaps we can call them the Arkell phase and the granny phase, or the grinding and conversion phases for the less whimsical. I've played through all of my slowplay endings** from the last two years - 39 games from 101 - and marked all the good and bad showings in both phases. As a grinder I scored +12 -4, but as a converter +7 -18 (for the last 6 months, +5 -1 and +1 -7 respectively.) Apparently I'm good at getting from nothing to a winning position, but woefully bad at signing on the dotted line. I suppose that should be easier to fix, but the hardest thing in chess is to win a won game!
The clock doesn't seem to have any bearing in the Arkell phase, but it certainly does when I try to convert. Of my 7 good conversions, 3 came when time trouble didn't feature, and the other 4 when it was only mild. In fact, I have got into severe time trouble 10 times, and in every single one of them, I have had an attempted conversion go horribly wrong. The clock is certainly a cause to some extent - in 15 cases (of 39!) the ending followed its natural course all the way, and in 12 of them neither side was in time trouble. But it also a symptom, for those 10 bad conversions only account for just over half of the total. Quite often I start out with a huge clock lead and burn it up within a couple of moves. This is a chess problem, not purely time management.
So, I can draw two main conclusions from this brief analysis. First, I need to improve my time management in the endgame, particularly my handling of blitz finishes. Second, I must focus on converting wins rather than crafting them. There is a psychological element to all of this, for I will find it much easier if I convince myself that I can play endgames. And I can! There are some fine grinds to my credit. But when things have gone wrong so many times, you start expecting it to happen again no matter how implausible it seems - which ensures that it does. It's high time to draw a line in the sand.
The lesson for today: Excel is your friend. (But if you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you knew that already.) Next time I will move onto time management, which in itself is a topic that I hope will be helpful for almost everybody.
* I drew games from winning positions against Golding, Furnevall, Chandna, Thestrup and Savory. I lost from a winning position against Sreeves, and from a pawn up against Wandowicz. The last game is tricky to classify but I never found a clear win so I've considered it a half-point dropped.
** I continue to apply my normal definition of 'endgame' - at most 3 pieces per side, excluding Kings.
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