Patience is a virtue

I had every intention of producing a video report for the first round of our tournament but then a case of Covid intervened to ruin the dulcet tones you are used to hearing from me. I will go with the tried and true format of a blog post instead.

With participants from more and more time zones the games are now spread across several days instead of everyone playing on Thursday evening. Roughly half the games of the round have been played so far and most of the rest will take place over the coming weekend. Considering the number of players and the number new to our tournaments I would say that things have gone relatively smoothly. Thanks to all of you for your cooperation. It is truly appreciated.

One of the more interesting games was @Kurt_rohrer56 vs @luwasserman. All but a pair of bishops were traded by move 24 and a pretty much level endgame was reached:

Black has a slight edge here mostly based on the fact that his bishop is likely to be more useful than White's prelate who is tied to the defense of the d4 pawn. White correctly understands that they need to bring their king up to help in the defense and a few moves later we reach this position:

The king is now protecting the d4 pawn and the bishop has been freed up for other defensive tasks such as preventing ...b4. White's pawns and bishop prevent an infiltration on the king-side and all White need do now is to be patient and wait. Instead, White makes a decisive error of a type that will be familiar to most of us. They decide that even though everything is stable they must absolutely do something. With his next move they give Black a new target in the form of the f4 pawn which Black immediately goes after:

Now it is Black's turn to practice patience. 31...Bd6 would attack both the f4 and b4 squares and freeze the opposing bishop on d2. White's king can not leave f3 as Ke3 loses the pawn to Bxf4+ and Kg3 allows Ke4. White would then be forced to make compromises in their position over the next few moves that Black should have been able to exploit. In the game Black played 31...h5 and a repetition of the position occurred a few moves later resulting in a draw.

Another, quite heartbreaking, example of the need for patience in endgames occurred in @Senff vs @hwelman where the following position was reached:

Black should win this easily but gets carried away by the excitement of a pawn race. After 60.d5 c3 61.d6 Black played 61...c2?? in order to ensure they would queen a pawn first but this only results in a draw. With the patience to play 61...Ke6 instead Black would have prevented the White pawn from queening at all and still queen his own pawn.

If there is a lesson here it is that patience can be worth points over the board. The great thing about it is that patience is not a chess skill and that we can all benefit from practicing it regardless of our level.

One of our members (@BluesKid1) is organizing a couple of events coming in October and November that might interest some of you. Check out the details here: https://lichess.org/@/BluesKid1/blog/the-classical-championship/iV4mscYY

Thanks again to everyone for playing and for making these events enjoyable. I am looking forward to a lot more interesting games.

David