Never Give Up! Never Surrender!

 

Galaxy Quest (you really should see this,if you haven't)

What a game! I played some blitz (5+3) this afternoon and this game was an air-punching victory for me!

It started with a pretty dense cluster of pieces in the center, during which I made bad moves, swinging the game to my opponent. We are both rated around 1300 on lichess.  I shuffled my pieces around trying to fix my situation (the eval bar showed a steady -6 through this time) and threatened his queen; I thought for a second I had the queen trapped and I guess they thought that too, because they just moved their king, allowing the queen to be captured.

The green arrow shows that they could have moved their queen to safety, but didn't.  A couple of moves later I followed that with this nice little tactic, forking the rook and king while my knight is safely on e6 (it can't be captured because the queen pins that pawn), and my opponent resigned.

I know it's hard to press on with a game where you're badly down in material, but at the level most people play chess at (myself definitely included!) pieces can still be given away for free which could turn the game around.