He beat a higher rated opponent because the other player made some small mistakes in the opening and a bigger mistake as that opening was progressing into the middle game. Nevertheless, he was able to take advantage of some of his opponents weak moves and apply correct principles to win. His book learning and his understanding of general strategy did not actually apply in this game, on that particular point.
Shirts does win the game, but the central pawns actually evaporate, leaving no fixed pawns in the center. Theoretically, that sounds good, except that this particular pawn structure does not look like it will actually become fixed in one or more pawn chains. Shirts thought about this position for awhile, during the game, and realized that it would be to his advantage to “coagulate” the center, so that his two knights and one bishop might function better than his opponent’s two bishops and one knight. This looks like an opportunity for an upset in favor of BP and that’s what happened. In the analysis, BP correctly recognized that this is an unfortunate way for Black to protect that pawn, meaning it’s unfortunate for Black.
With high tension in central pawns and the black king not yet castled, this has given Black a big problem: how to prevent the loss of an important pawn.īlack just moved his king from d8 to d6, protecting the c5 pawn. In addition, Black lost another tempo in fianchettoing his king-side bishop. Black has taken three moves for his queen-knight to capture White’s light-colored-square bishop, so BP gained a tempo there. Shirts) has the advantage in this Queen’s Gambit Declined. In Diagram-1, White (played by the Backyard Professor: Mr. You can see how he won the game with some book knowledge, in a video that he calls Chessercise and the underdog.ĭiagram-1 Black is in trouble, behind in development Let’s look at part of a game that Shirts played against an opponent who was rated 1390. Yet with any particular game, the underdog may win against a stronger opponent. If that’s his level and my own is now only 1500, the mathematics of the rating system predicts that I would win a match against the Backyard Professor (BP), scoring 90% of the points (one point per win and half a point per draw). Yet from observing his analysis in his Youtube videos, I doubt that his playing level is above about 1100, at the most. Also, my rating of 1606 comes from tournaments I played in two decades ago, and age is catching up with me. It’s possible the rating of 747 comes from nervousness in official competition, with chess clocks. Shirts, and that competitor said that Shirts was about equal to him in playing strength. In fact, a player rated about 1200 was once a regular opponent of Mr. In other words, our ratings may not be accurate.
except for one thing: Both of our USCF ratings are provisional, meaning they are from a limited number of official games. It would seem that my victory in a chess game against the Backyard Professor would also be a foregone conclusion. Shirts across the board from me and consider my rating of 1606, which is nothing to brag about among average adult tournament players (I’m #363 for currently-rated players in the state of Utah). The difference between our rating levels appears to resemble the difference between Mr. *(I mean a real novice who has played the royal game only on occasion and has not studied it from any chess book.) It’s almost a foregone conclusion that the Backyard Professor will win that game. Regardless of book learning, take a typical American chess beginner* and set him or her across the board from Mr. His rating with the United States Chess Federation (as of mid-November, 2015) is only 747, not in the top 1,000 players in the state of Idaho (Don’t confuse the number of players with the rating itself, for there is no direct relationship between the rating number and the number of rated players in a particular state). Yet he seems to have neglected the critically important tactical aspects of the game of chess, diving into strategy before he adequately developed elementary skills in tactics. He has studied a number of chess books, including at least two of them that were written by the master Jeremy Silman. To begin, I have found the Youtube chess videos of Kerry Shirts (AKA the “Backyard Professor”) to be delightful entertainment and probably helpful to a number of raw beginners, maybe very helpful to many of them.