Bird's Opening (4), defensive trading

Today’s game is a USCF rated game at the club played at G75 with a 30 second increment. My opponent is high school player who plays a good tactical game. The game opened with the mainline version of Bird’s Opening. 

When y’all see a sharp rise (or fall) in the graph followed immediately by a sharp fall (or rise), it indicates that the first player blundered and the second player missed the response. There are several in this game, showing that both players didn’t see as deeply into the possibilities as Houdini’s analysis.

The majority of my tactical missteps occur in the early middlegame after the pieces are fully deployed. The level of my tactical problems will be increased to address this problem, trading off complexity for quantity. On the plus side, the endgame technique was reasonable for the level of play.

The variations and move evaluations are Houdini’s (1.5 32-bit), diagnosed with ‘Scid vs PC’ at 15 seconds per ply and a 0.6 error threshold. The verbal comments are my thoughts during the game and my interpretations of the analysis provided by Houdini. The score chart is at the bottom of this entry.

My first tournament of the year is now finished, scoring 3 draws and 2 losses. This year I intend to play in the section that my rating decides. In prior years I always played up as there was a large gap between my rating and either the top or bottom section. I am enjoying the game more now and find that my deficiencies are easier to find and maybe correct.

Today’s endgame study: the initial position was taken from Chernev’s Practical Chess Endgames.  This endgame has a lot of tricks in it and it is well worth the effort to learn the technique. Take the endgame FEN and paste it into your favorite engine and try to repeat the win. My opponent was Houdini set at full strength.

FEN "8/8/8/8/1k6/4p1P1/6P1/6K1 w - - 0 1