Queen Alice Miniature

One disadvantage of playing a lot of games at one time on any server is that you don’t have enough time to adequately check your analysis. It must just be my opinion, but I’d rather play 6 or 8 games well even if it means that I may have to wait a couple days for my opponent to move rather than have dozens of games going on all at the same time.

I’ve never learned to play chess of the computer screen like it was a video game so when the position starts getting complicated and I need to ponder a move, I have to actually set it up on a real board and start shifting plastic so that’s another reason I can’t play a whole lot of games all at once.

In this game my opponent played the Vienna Gambit which is very similar to the K-Gambit. I never accept the K-Gambit because I am not familiar with those types of positions and my experience has been that gambit players are far less knowledgeable of positions resulting from declining their gambit than those that arrive from its acceptance.

Kuarwaki is a pretty strong player so I was surprised to see such an obvious oversight; no doubt from playing too many games without adequate time for analysis.

I’m waaaaaay down the rating list on Queen Alice but am currently in 6th place among U.S. players on the rating list. I’ve played on a couple of sites against players rated over 2400 and have found that they are very hard to defeat regardless of the site you are playing on. For example at Chessworld where I was rated about 2360, I never could break 2400 and the players there at that level seem to be about the same strength as Queen Alice. One thing about Chessworld, several of their top players aren’t anonymous and have verifiable FIDE of BCF ratings. Woman GM Yelena Dembo plays there occasionally.

I know a lot of players will claim everybody at those ratings is using engines, and while some are, not everybody is. I’ve been around long enough to know that there are a lot of good players out there. And I also know something it seems like a lot of players on Internet sites don’t know. A lot of players are better than me and every time I lose it’s not to an engine.

Of course I’m talking server sites here. When you get into official CC play, like with the ICCF, things get kind of dicey because most of those players are a little more serious about their chess than your typical server player. Especially those of us who are too cheap to actually pay for membership on a site.