Saturday, August 10, 2013

An Absolute Travesty of a Game

I present to you a game I played a couple of weeks ago that was a complete opening disaster.  I waited too long to play Nge4 and I should have chopped the Black knight on d5 rather than letting it get to f5.


2 comments:

  1. Unlucky to lose that one Chris!

    I am quite new to chess (haven't even played a rated over the board game yet). Never the less I took a brief look at your game and I have a few questions. Your position after move 15 looks completely passive to me, I hate such positions and would have retarded my development for some initiative. Were you happy with the position?

    Also 16.Na4 looks like you completely take the knight out of the game. I don't like playing moves like 17.c4 which gives the black rooks d3 to aim at. But I can see you are better at tactics than me I would not have seen the lines in your analysis.

    Anyway Good luck with Future improvements.

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  2. Greg, thanks for the comments.

    I was not happy with position at all after 15 moves. The issue is that I was somehow led into passivity by senseless fear. There was nothing to be afraid of regarding Black's "attack" as my king position was super solid.

    But I kept seeing the ideas of ...f5 which Black was about to play and was thinking that if I chop the knight and Black has a pawn on d5 then I am in danger of getting steamrolled.

    But it's not true. I can hold that position. Instead I let the fear overwhelm me and I went completely passive.

    As for 16. Na4 and 17. c4 you are correct on both points, but my intention was to try to drum up some sort of counterplay and so I decided to push c4 and accept the backwards pawn on d3 since I was up a pawn and thinking that if I lose it back that's OK as long as I get some activity. The problem of course is that it's too slow.

    So considering that you've only just started playing you seem like you have a lot of potential. I say you play some rated games at some point in the near future and see where it takes you...

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