Saturday, October 22, 2011

Chess Blogger v. Chess Blogger! ChessAdmin-RLP 10.15.11 1/2-1/2

I've had the pleasure of playing a few serious training games on FICS with ChessAdmin recently and we agreed that annotating the most recent one might be fun and instructive for both of us. Hopefully, it has some value for the rest of the chess world, as well. Okay, for the .001 of 1% of the chess world who frequent our blogs.

ChessAdmin has posted his analysis at Annotated Game #15: Blogger Throwdown (RLP). While we seem to have pointed out many of the same moves and lines, there are some interesting differences, too. It's a game worth examining and I invite you to check out his comments. (Editor--it might be helpful for folks to know that the time control is 60 5. Thanks, Ed.)

ChessAdmin is a player of about equal strength to me (somewhere in USCF Class B) so the games have been pretty closely fought. I've managed a plus score but but mainly I've enjoyed the stimulating chess and the friendly atmosphere. The game from last Saturday was a good battle and featured a fighting middle game where I obtained some advantage, and a queen ending that could have been almost unbearably complex. You'll see the mind bending variations and the surprising finish below...

This was our third game and knowing I was scheduled for black I gave some thought to the opening, since he has written some very good posts about his repertoire and how he approaches it. I expected 1. c4 and for much of my career played the King's Indian Defense against it, with 1. ..e5 being my other main choice. Lately I've been employing the Tarrasch Defense against the English, and in our first game that had led to a nice win for me. But since he had written about the kingside v. queenside "race" in the Reversed Sicilian recently I thought I might go back to that scenario, fun for and practice.

I did it through a rather cagey order of moves, and instead of putting all my verbiage in the small print of the annotations below I give the first eight moves here, with comments:

1.c4 g6 (A little jest, in that I didn't at all expect 2. d4, but if he surprised me I was okay with a KID) 2.Nf3 Bg7 3.g3 Nc6 (Still shadowboxing a bit, giving one last chance to go d4. But he sticks to his knitting) 4.Bg2 e5 5.Nc3 Nge7 (To leave the possibility of f5 on the table. Nf6 is probably a perfectly good move but I prefer the imbalances created by the text) 6.O-O O-O 7.d3 d6 8.Rb1 Bg4 and we now return you to your scheduled program:

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I like the dueling analysis, just edited my game post with a link here. You provide a nice window into the opening choice thinking process, as well as some of your middlegame choices. It's also valuable to see what kinds of threats you were looking at, especially ones that I may not have considered myself.

I'm sure you would have found the win at the end if we'd had more than the time increment to work with, but at that point any calculation was impossible.

Will have to give some thought to my next game as Black now...

Anonymous said...

Seems like you have spent a lot of time annotating a mediocre game where you played like a beginner at the end.