This game (while far from perfect) highlights the idea of gaining time or “a tempo” in chess. When you develop a piece while attacking you can force the opponent to waste time moving their pieces around the board. My opponent in the game continued to move their queen around the board and this gave me the time I needed to get all of my pieces in on the action. There is a nice mating sequence at the end of the game too. Can you spot it?
This was an interesting blitz game. My opponent played a weak opening that gave me a slight advantage from the start and then the game had a few interesting attacking ideas along with a few missed ideas.
Hi everyone!
Here is blitz game just for laughs today. I made a mouse slip early on the the game with g5. It ends up being a good move as I pick up a knight for free and then go on to just clean up the game. Another interesting thing about this game was that I had an accuracy score of 98.7. The only bad move being the mouse slip?! I play on chess.com and I really like the accuracy feature and game analysis tools on the site. I may post more about those in the future.
I have always played the Sicilian Defence, but as the years have passed I have forgotten quite a bit of theory on the opening. The Sicilian gives black winning chances as the imbalanced positions are often double edged. If you take a wrong step in the opening you often get crushed (or have an awful backward pawn to deal with) and this is what has been happening to me (a lot!) as I look to relearn the Sicilian Defence.
The variation I have been looking at over the past few days is the Najdorf variation. This is a very popular line that can lead to some crazy positions.
Check out the position between Fabiano Caruana and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave from their most recent match up in the Sinquefield Cup.
I have been trying to play this opening in all of my blitz games and so this month I have played 9 games in the Najdorf variation. I won 3, drew 1 and lost 5. Clearly there is still a bit of learning to do!
Here is a game that given more time I may have won. It was a fun game though and the best example of the classic queenside attack with b5 to b4.
Learning The Najdorf Read More »