Second Epoch Solutions

 About

 News

 Esa Engine Demo

 Games

 AJAX

 LevenshteinMind

 Chess

 IP

 Programming Axioms

 UNIX Millenium Bug

 Contact

 Links

 

 RSS


Matt Pullin
GreenCastle

Chess Videos


This is a player provided by YouTube that can play the most recent 50 uploads to my channel.
Subscribe to my YouTube channel and you will be notified when I produce a new video.




My Chess Style

Since coming back to the game after not really playing during college, my style has changed in many respects.
In the past I was always known as an "openings guy" who would beat my opponents quickly with my knowledge of traps and theory.
These days I change the openings I play really frequently, in fact many of the lines that I play are more or less made up.

Currently I am playing 1.e4 for White, opting for lines such as the Vienna Game, the Grand Prix Attack Sicilian, Advance Variation vs. the French, etc... lines where I am playing for space at the expense of time (and sometimes, material). For Black I have been practicing classical defenses (1.e4 e5, 1.d4 d5, etc.) but I am likely to change it up every once and a while based on mood.
I have played the French, Taimanov Sicilian, and Pribyl defenses for Black previously. For White I also have experience with the Reti, Dynamic English and the Veresov.

I am generally a positional player, I like to fight for space with my pawns with an eye to the endgame. One of my favorite tactical concepts is attrition: when ahead material I will sacrifice material to get favorable trades. I subscribe to the Nimzovitch school of thought on blockades, keeping a key opposing pawn blockaded to bottleneck the opponent's growth is central to my strategy in a lot of games.
I know more about Rook endgame technique than most at my level, but occasionally I still struggle with minor piece endings and converting won Queen endings.

I have been playing on FICS recently (username Shidinov) for practice. It is here I am likely to experiment with my openings and probably lose some games very badly. I also play on ChessCube (username GreenCastleB) regularly.
I dislike any chess in between 5 and 60 minutes in general. In G5 I can get away with "sight chess" and if I'm playing at that time control chances are the game isn't important anyway.
G60 is my favorite time control. There is enough time to think deeply, yet short enough to get an opponent in time trouble.

I love playing bughouse. I was 2000+ on one of the old ICSs, then I stopped. I'm nowhere near as good as bughouse 2000s today, but I still enjoy playing at my club. I regularly attend the Evanston Chess Club.

My USCF standard rating has caught up to my skill level. It's been hovering around 2050 which is about where it should be. Definitely below Master level, but slightly better than the bottom 90% of the world's chessplayers :-)
In case you want to look up my current USCF rating and tournaments I have played in, you can do so here.


From My Personal Database

Despite advancements in chess technology, I still take notation in tournaments with pen and paper, and enter some of them into ChessBase 9 later. If a game is not here, either A) it's a bad game, or B) I just lost it.
Some of these games were entered into PgnMentor and not ChessBase, so they have incomplete metadata. Eventually I'll go through and reconcile these ones with the physical scoresheets.

The following is a PGN (Portable Game Notation) file.
You can copy/paste the contents into the program of your choice that plays PGN files in order to review these games.



 

http://secondepoch.com     © 2005-2010 Second Epoch Solutions