Fighting against oneself

  
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Fighting against oneself


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Thibault de Vassal    (2008-02-13 02:37:09)
Fighting against oneself

After having played about a hundred correspondence chess & Go games simultaneously during a few months at FICGS & IECG, I'm finally to reach a reasonable number of games... Oof ! Correspondence chess is definitely addicting, server chess and FICGS chess WCH time control makes it even more oppressive when playing too many games, but it is still hard to resist to this continuous challenge.

Correspondence chess has changed a lot during these last 2 years and looks just deeper & deeper to me as chess engines like Rybka, Fritz, Hiarcs and others improve, as well as CC players' opening books. A player rated 2400 nowadays plays probably at least 50 points above a player rated the same two years ago but trusting an engine without looking deeply at the position still generally means losing (which is quite positive, chess is not dead)... Of course I lost some games to very good players these last months, but I also lost some to myself, definitely playing too fast or too confident, in example this nice game with Gaetano Laghetti in WCH round-robin final 1, that I just waste at move 70 after a hard battle to ensure a draw. In the same time, I feel to have improved quite a lot at Go, just by playing stronger players, this game is definitely deeper than chess and I'll probably have many difficulties to win some more points after having reached 1 kyu but FICGS is a place to learn patience and definitely I have to improve a lot yet :)