My second tournament at the FIDE Online Arena did not start at all the same way as the first one did. This game was played in the first round of the WORLD OPEN RAPID tournament that was played at FOA March 15th 2015. The game below was my first loss in the tournaments played there and many have followed after this. All the tournaments that I have played there have been with 15 minute time controls, except the one I played yesterday and to my surprise it did not feature any monitored games and thus my game requirement did not change by that tournament. So in some ways it was a waste of my time. This game was not played all that well by me and I wish I had seen the move 26.Bf6! as that would have been a nice move to play in the game. Today I have updated the mate in one, four, five, nine and ten puzzle pages by adding one more puzzle to them.
The first time I made clearly a wrong decision in this game was in the position below after my opponent's 14th move Nxe3. For some reason I decided to take back on e3 with the pawn. The move looks really horrible now that I look at it, but I guess I understand the reason why I played it. I am assuming that I wanted to keep my current threats to the bishop and to the pawn on c7. Unfortunately those two threats are easily dealt with as THUMATI could just move the bishop to b6.
There might have been another reason behind the move 15.fxe3 and it is that I might have been worried about Bd6 if I take on e3 with my bishop. It would not have been as dangerous as I might have thought at first during the game. While my 15th move was the starting point for my downhill, it was not the losing move. The losing move of the game I played in the position below after 17...Rfe8.
I played 18.Rad1 and most likely realised my mistake right after I had made that move. I can't really remember all that clearly anymore, but if I did not understand my mistake before my opponent made the next move, I certainly understood the mistake after the move 18...Bg4 had appeared on the board. I continued what may have seemed like a pointless resistance after the blunder, but then we reached the position below after 24.Rg1.
In that position THUMATI played 24...Bd4, going from a winning position to a losing position. I replied with 25.Bxd8 and things looked going my way. THUMATI continued with an interesting idea 25...Rxd3. At this point both players probably were under some time pressure. Unfortunately for me I was not able to find either of the two good moves in the position, 26.Bf6 or 26.Qc8. It would have been a decent idea to play 26.cxd3, but the two aforementioned moves were winning while 26.cxd3 was only good enough for a clear advantage. Instead of winning the game, I blundered it away by playing 26.h3??
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