But the average time between me reaching 1300 and me falling below it is one game, so let's do some bragging now.
My BabasChess program with its Crafty engine is a great free program for analysis (http://www.babaschess.net/). The program is going as I type, so let me get my analysis done first before I see what it says.
[Event "ICC"]
[Site "Internet Chess Club"]
[Date "2009.09.06"]
[White "KyleMayhugh"]
[Black "Mysti"]
[Result "1-0"]
[WhiteElo "1301"]
[BlackElo "1258"]
[ECO "D10"]
[Opening "QGD Slav defense"]
[TimeControl "1800+0"]
1. d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. Bf4 e6 5. Nf3 Nbd7
6. e3 Be7 7. cxd5 cxd5 8. Bd3 a6 9. O-O Nh5
This far is more or less standard. I was annoyed by Nh5 and the realiation that I'm losing my bishop pair and having to move a pawn away from the center. I wanted him to exchange the knights too and let me move that pawn back to the D-file, but he didn't seem interested
10. Ne5 Nxf4
11. exf4 O-O 12. Qc2 f5
Making threats whenever possible, threatening to take the rook pawn.
13. Ne2 b5
Not a ton of good moves available to me, but I thought this knight would be more useful on the other side of the board.
14. Ng3 g6 15. Rae1 Bb7
Okay, this position is looking pretty intractable. But I feel like he's pretty cramped back there and wouldn't be able to move properly if I seized the initiative, so...
16. Nxg6! hxg6
I'm going to go ahead and give myself an exclamation point for that one. I get two pawns back for my knight in the short term, threatening a third and now he's got a very insecure king with a lot of my pieces pointing to his king side.
17. Rxe6 Rc8
His response looks pretty poor to me. He makes a pointless threat, as if I'm not going to move the queen and probably move it to somewhere better. Meanwhile, he gets a rather worthless file on the opposite side of the board from where the action is.
18. Qe2 Rf7
Qe2 threatens to win a piece. Something I saw in a column I was reading the other day is that when faced with a threatened piece, moving it is usually better than guarding it, because guarding it ties down a piece you could have used elsewhere. A common mistake at our level, one I'm guilty of often.
19. Rxg6+ Rg7
Now material is technically even, but it's three pawns for a piece and an interesting position if we get to the endgame like that. But I've got initiative and pieces deep in his territory attacking that king, so I have no intention of this getting to the endgame.
20. Rxg7+ Kxg7
I did some thinking about Qh5 and trading the rooks on g6 instead of g7, but I was worried about letting him off the mat, so to speak, and giving him a chance to get his queen into the defense.
From here, it was easy to just harrass and pick off those cramped in pieces and take an insurmountable material advantage.
21. Nxf5+ Kf8 22. Qh5 Bf6 23. Qh6+ Kf7 24. Nd6+ Ke6 25. Nxb7 Qh8
26. Re1+ Kf7 27. Nd6+ Kg8 28. Qxh8+ Kxh8 29. Nxc8 Bxd4 (black resigns)
1-0
New rating: 1301!
Okay, Crafty's verdict?
Not a big fan of 16 Nxg6, scoring it at -1.39 and giving it a question mark. But then again, a few moves later without any blunders it insists black's best line is just even, so maybe it wasn't so bad. Either way, it made things very hard to defend.
It seems that the next key moment was the one I identified correctly: 18. ... Rf7, trying to protect the bishop instead of moving it. With 18. ... Bf6, which Crafty felt after about seven more moves for each side would reach a drawn position in which I could check perpetually while being down heavily on material.
19. Rg7 more or less ended the game. Crafty felt that Kh8 would have left white down just 3.5 points, a difference that loses less quickly.
Oops! On move 20, I didn't follow the basic rule of the thought process: Check my checks! I was thinking about Qh5, and I hadn't even considered seriously Qe6+! But it didn't matter at this point, the game was won.
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