Staying at 2000

The title of today’s post is an homage to Ivan Wijetunge’s “Getting to 2000” blog in which he chronicles his ambitious goal of increasing his rating from 1800 to 2000 between June 2006 and the February 2007 rating supplement. As it was nine years from when I first cleared 1800 in 1997 to when I hit 2000 in September of 2006, I thought his schedule was rather optimistic.

I put my Expert rating on the line for the first time last weekend at the Tim Just Winter Open. My chess activity for the last four months has pretty much been limited to coaching and the rust showed in the first round when I lost to 1865 rated Mikhail Korenman. Mikhail is running for the USCF Executive Board and I guess he knows one vote that he won’t be getting. In the second round, I was fortunate enough to meet a player who was even rustier than me. Steven Napoli had not played since last year's Winter Open, and I managed to whip up a mating attack against his 1.b3.

I came closest to losing my expert rating against the third highest rated nine year old in the country, 1903 rated Alexander Velikanov. I went pawn hunting with my queen and ended up losing a piece for two pawns. Luckily, Alexander missed a chance to get the queens off the board and I managed to bamboozle him in time pressure to recover the piece and reach a winning rook and pawn ending. (The game is posted here.) That leaves eleven year old Zhe Quan as the youngest player to beat me. I played a bit better on the second day with a draw with 1958 Daniel McNally and a win over 1800 Aakaash Meduri.

Ivan did not reach his goal within the time limit he set for himself, but I hope he will keep on trying. I had been bouncing around the upper 1900’s for three years before I was able to string together five decent tournaments in a row to reach the goal I had set many years earlier. I hope I can hold Expert for awhile. At the ripe old age of forty-nine, it is hard for me to believe that Master is a realistic goal, but you never know.