Last day of the year brings a new opening variation to look at. It might not be new to you, but it is to me. The game below was played in a team match called REMATCH: Battle For Victory vs. NINJA EMPIRE ~ 忍者帝国. The match is being played on 102 boards, so it is a decent size match. I am playing on board 11 for Battle For Victory. The score in the match is at the moment I type this 79.5 - 85.5 in favor of NINJA EMPIRE ~ 忍者帝国. The match has featured both of the things you do not like to see in these team matches, timeouts and people who have the cheater badge next to their usernames. In the game below I started to go a bit wrong with the move 10...Bxd5, which allows e4 with a tempo. It was not the losing move and only gave my opponent some play he or she would not have had if I had played 10...exd5 instead. I started to drift towards a loss after I played 13...c5. I thought during the game that I could get the pawn back relatively easily which is why I sacrificed it in the first place. I thought that it would be better than to allow Nc6 which I did not like to see at all. I collapsed completely only a few moves later.
Because this is the last day of 2015, I want to take a look back on the year and see what has happened during this year in this blog of mine and in my chess and chess960 games and other stuff related to it. When this year started I was playing 270+ correspondence games and on January 12th I was playing 300 games at the same time. It only lasted for a few hours though and after that peak, I wanted to decrease my game load. I have been able to do that quite nicely and for awhile I had maybe less than 70 games in progress. However, lately I have increased the amount of games I play to some extent. I am currently playing 99 games at the same time. It has been actually easier to handle than I have previously thought. I have also started playing at the Queen Alice Internet Chess Club again where my rating peaked at 2203 September 10th this year. It is also my current rating there. I have two games in progress there, one is against a player who is rated 2267 and the other one is rated 2617. I have never before played against a player rated 2600+ before this in a correspondence game. I think I faced a GM rated over 2600 couple of years ago in a blitz tournament.
When I played more games, I was able to keep my rating higher in different sites. Recently my rating has dropped at Chess.com and Red Hot Pawn clearly under 1900. Especially at Chess.com I have been going downhill lately. The main reason for that is that I have been facing higher rated people on average than before. However, I have also been playing a lot worse than before. While I started more games, I also tried out two sites that I had not played at before, chessrex.com and lichess.org. Both of those sites I will keep on playing in the future as well. Lichess I have only played rapid chess960 games and I think that will continue be the case also in the future. While I play and have played both chess and chess960 at ChessRex, I think I would prefer to play chess960 there.
I am now playing correspondence chess in five different sites, Chess.com, Red Hot Pawn, GameKnot, ChessRex and Queen Alice Internet Chess Club. I have also played on other places this year, ICC, FICS and maybe at playchess.com too, but I do not remember if it was last year instead. I was able to get my standard rating at FICS to 2180 this year, which is my peak rating there. Lastly I would like to take a look at some statistics from this blog. I have now covered 442 different opening variations, 43 different chess960 starting positions and I have also added 2071 puzzles in total since the time I started doing this blog. If my statistics are correct, there are now 1168 analysed chess games out of which I have won 703 (60.19%), drawn 113 (9.67%) and lost 352 (30.14%) games. Out of all the opening variations I featured, I have had the best success with C62 Spanish Game: Steinitz Defense my winning percentage is 81.82% after 11 games. I only considered the variations where I had ten or more games played. My worst variation at the moment from the ones I have played more than 10 times is C64 Spanish Game: Classical Variation. Charousek Variation, I have lost half of the 14 games I have played in that variation. I have also shared 77 analysed chess960 games, out of which I have won 48 (62.3%), drawn 10 (13%) and lost 19 (24.7%).
I have also earned two official FIDE titles this year, the first one, Arena FIDE Master, I received on April 14th and the second one, Arena International Master on December 12th! I was not able to get any wins against titled players this year, but I have a game against an IM currently at Chess.com. Some sites like Red Hot Pawn or Queen Alice Internet Chess Club it is not clear always if someone is a titled player, but on both sites I face currently opponents that could be IM or even GM strength based on their ratings there. For all who have read this, happy new year!! Also big thank you to all who have followed me on Google+ and Twitter or shared my posts in these places, it is much appreciated!
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