Crazy game ends in surprise victory

 This game was pretty wild! I started with the very unusual b3 (called the "Nimsowitch-Larsen attack") because chess.com has badges/awards/achievements for doing certain openings. This was the last "easy" one to get because it only required me to play this particular first move. Most of the remaining badges I need to get (yes, need!) require the other person to play certain responses to my moves, and that's impossible to guarantee.

Oh, and I missed checkmating him TWICE around move 21.  But I am sort of proud of the rook sacrifice I did to hit his king at the end; something told me to go for it because I had another rook ready to jump in, and lucky for me it worked out. That's a terrible way to play chess though :)

Analysis showed we both played with about 30% accuracy, which is awful, and I lucked into a checkmate that I had no idea was coming - I thought I was just checking his king; this kind of thing happens when you are running low on time in a three-minute game!

Beginner's Luck with the English Opening

 I looked through the Awards section of chess.com to see what other badges and trinkets I could earn for my account. I noticed a section I hadn't paid much attention to: the opening books. They give you a little badge for opening a game in a certain way; some of them are multiple moves, but other's such as the English opening just require your first move to be a particular one. You might even earn some of these by accident!

I picked the English opening, 1. c4, and thought "I'll just blast through a game and see what happens; if I lose I'll still get the bade. Lucky for me the game went really smoothly with a nice finish!

Can you see the mate in 2?

That was fun! I'll try and get the other opening book badges too, which will let me get a taste for other openings. I'm currently doing London system as white and as black I'm playing the French against 1. e4 and a kind of semi-slav (which is close to a reverse London system) against everything else.

Your Opponent Can Mess Up Just Like You Can, Only Worse!

 Here's a great example of why it's good to keep playing, despite how hopeless your situation may seem.  

This game went downhill pretty quickly for me after the opening; it's a "daily" game, so each player has up to 24 hours to make their move. I messed up my first attack and all my attempts to trick my opponent into letting me back into the game failed, until the point above.  Analysis shows I was at -10, a crushingly imbalanced position when he castled and I moved my queen to here.

I assumed he would check my king with his queen, and I'd slip through my wall of pawns and hopefully be able to deliver the coup de grace and win the game if I could just avoid getting checked on one turn myself.

Luckily for me my opponent went Nf5, leaving me a nice mate in 2. Can you see it?  In a daily game you have time to use the analysis board and play the moves out, even the stuff you assume will work, just to be sure!

Turn off TV video/screen but keep the sound on

 Here's a useful tip a situation where you want to listen to music through your TV, or the speakers connected to it, but don't want to have the TV screen on while you do so.  My TV has this as a hidden feature that isn't even described in the manual - maybe yours does too?

Do a "long press" of the audio mute button - they usually have an image like the one above. Point the remote control at the TV and HOLD that button down for a second or two. If you're lucky the audio will actually stay on but the TV screen will switch off.

A winning game at a live tournament

 Our chess club meets every Tuesday night and the last meeting of each month is an official tournament. Our scores are entered into the US Chess Federation database and it usually brings some very strong players out of the woodwork that are working on their ratings. 

My first game was against a ten year old with a rating of 1950 (I'm about 1100). Our ratings meant he had a 99.7% chance of beating me . . . and he did, easily!

I want to post the third game I played that night because it encapsulates a lot about where I am as a chess player. 

https://lichess.org/pzFgEQkY 

Pawn to b5 was the key error in this game, allowing the devastating Nxc6

The game was fairly even until he allowed me to take his knight (free) AND fork both his rooks (also both unprotected)! It was a heck of a moment :) I remember seeing that square one move before, seeing that his b pawn was preventing me capturing and I thought "I know I shouldn't be playing hope chess, but I *really* hope he moves that pawn!" And then he did!" I looked at it closely to see if it was a trap, of course, but it wasn't :)

Interestingly computer analysis says I was winning until I pushed pawn to a3, but lucky for me that his response of b5 push swung threw the game back to me, and I maintained that strong lead to the end of the game. He allowed me to get his bishop cheaply too, which made the endgame easier.

I had played the same opponent in a crazy casual game the week before where I blundered (lost stupidly) two queens against him and he pulled a draw out of what was clearly a win for me, I knew I would have to be VERY careful to finish this game well. That memory is what made me move my knight and rook away from the queenside around move 44 - I could just "feel" I was going to lose a piece if I let his king get amongst my pieces!

Even the mate came as a surprise to me - I thought I was just checking him!

--


My victories usually come not because I engineered some amazing strategy and won, but rather that I saw an error my opponent made and I'm able to capitalize on it. I like to put it as: "I didn't win; my opponent lost."

Bryan Tillis, the club founder, said in response to this: "The lower the level, the more the evaluation of the game looks like a ping-pong match. It is not who blunders the most, it is who blunders last. I don't see players imposing their will on the position until 1600+. Before that rating range it is mostly blunder checking to get wins. I was once told by a strong GM that anyone can make it to USCF 2000 by simply not blundering; getting to master, though, requires a mass amount of loss and effort to learn a new skill set to work the position much like a boxer works in the ring."

So it turns out I'm pretty normal at this point :)