The Zagreb Championship is coming up next Monday, so I am trying to train as much as possible and as part of that I will be playing several training games.
The Swiss tournament system is relentless. In the first round I will be facing someone rated between 2150 and 2300 since I’m now around 1910. That means that the odds are against me. Because of that, I am trying to get prepared and concentrate on my openings, as well as practice tactics and endgames as much as possible. Another major part of my prep are training games. I’ve noticed that my play tends to improve after I have played several games, and I almost always perform better and blunder less in the second half of a tournament. So this is an attempt to get into “tournament mode” before round 1 starts!
In this game I faced a slightly lower rated opponent. He opened with Nf3, and we entered a King’s Indian Attack. I went for a setup with d5, c5, Nc6, which makes the long diagonal his bishop is on quite dangerous for me. It is much simpler too play setups with d5, c6, e6, Be7, where the diagonal is well defended. That decision almost cost me the game. I missed a tactical shot he had. He could have exploited the weak diagonal and won the exchange. Luckily, he too missed that.
After that, my position was slightly better than his, and he had a weak pawn on c4 I could exploit. I saw that the pawn structure was favorable for me and that any exchanges would favor me, so I accepted his offer to exchange rooks. We ended up trading everything but the knight and bishop. I had a superior position and it was fairly easy to convert it into a win.
Still, a stronger player would have crushed me! I need more practice against the KIA, and I need to create a solid repertoire to be able to meet it in a real game. A lot of work to be done until Monday!
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