Never Pay Attention to Your Opponent's Rating! Never!

It looks like my streak of gaining rating points for nine tournaments in a row may have ended this weekend in Madison. Just like last February, I won my first three games before losing to Master Alexander Betanelli in the last round. Unlike February's event, my opponent's ratings were a bit lower slower and my rating was a bit higher so the same score will probably knock me down a couple points rather than bumping me up a couple.


In the third round I played the black pieces against a young man named Xiaoming Wang who sported a rating of 1464, which for all I know could have been 400 points under his current strength. He played one of the sharpest lines against my Sicilian Najdorf, 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3 a6 6.Bg5. This used to be the mainline in Bobby Fischer's day and it can lead to some extremely sharp positions with White castling queenside and pawn storming Black on the kingside.

I thought I might be about to get my comeuppance for not having done any studying since the since the Chicago Open. One of the risks of playing the Sicilian is that I occasionally get blown off the board with the latest theoretical innovation from some GM tournament. Still, I figured it would be a fun game.

The game did not turn out like I expected. My opponent ended up playing rather passively. He held off castling until he saw where I put my king and then he put his on the same side. The position was very tight for twenty-six moves when he created a weakness that let me penetrate with my rook. Up until that point, I had nothing. After the game, he told me that he had recently studied the opening, but he did not want to play it the way he studied it because my rating was so high.

Since he was a nice young man, I did not want to tell him he was a fool to him to be intimidated by my rating, but he was. The truth is that I am thrilled when my opponents avoid opening theory because I am too lazy to keep up on it myself. I accept that the price of my laziness is going to be getting crushed occassionally by some kid who is booked up on his openings. Luckily, the last few who have done so have had high enough ratings that it has not hurt mine much, but there is no reason this lad could not have clipped me for twenty points.

I haven't been an expert very long, but it seems like more of my opponents cite my rating as a factor in their decisions than they did when my rating was under 2000. They are very silly. As an acquaintance of mine whose rating peaked at 1973 once said "Expert, Schmexpert!"