Chess960 SP369

I played two games of chess960 at lichess.org again today and below are the games I played analysed. These were played with 10 minute time controls without increment. That being said I think my opponent played too fast and only used 3 minutes 27 seconds for the game and by comparison I used 6 minutes and 23 seconds for the game. I am not afraid to use the time to make the moves even in these games without increment, because if I just blitz out the moves, I am very likely to play really horrible moves. I have noticed in these 14 years or so that I have played chess more or less actively that I am much more likely to win if I use more time than my opponent to the game. Of course the time usage should be concentrated on the critical positions and not so much on the opening phase necessarily, well in the case of chess that is. In chess960 it is useful to take a look on the starting position you are facing and plan out how you are going to develop your pieces, to me that may take a minute or two depending on the time controls. Maybe with the time controls that were used in the games below, it may be 30 seconds or so. Well, long enough that I know I should be able to develop my pieces to relatively good squares. Some pieces, like the queen are sometimes in positions where it is quite hard to get them into the game. So I try to take all that into consideration when thinking about what my first move should be. I also consider the side that seems better to castle on. In some starting positions I think that castling on the queenside is far better than castling on the kingside, like in this particular starting position I would prefer castling on the queenside mainly because the queen is located on h1 and h8, which means I am likely to open the long diagonal for the queen by playing g3 or g6 depending which side of this I am. If I have learned something about chess, it is that it is not a good idea to have that diagonal open on the side that you have castled if you have not fianchettoed your bishop. I have added one mate in two, two mate in three, one mate in four and one mate in five puzzle today.

Game number two. This was a rematch offered by my opponent which I accepted without much thought. I think in the case of chess960, it is a good idea to play on both sides of the starting position in order to give your opponent a change to play on the favorable side, though I am not sure if this particular starting position clearly favors either side. In some starting positions I have prefered to play with white and others I have prefered to play with the black pieces. This is the 26th or maybe 27th different starting position for chess960 that I have encountered. The reason I am not sure because I have no idea what the starting position was when I played chess960 over the board. Though the likelihood that it would have been something that I have played online is quite small, at the moment anyway.

Game number three. This was played at lichess.org. It was a 5 minute game without increment. As you might notice from the name of my opponent, I faced a random opponent in a game that was not rated. Because of that I can't really tell anything about the playing strength of my opponent. I think Anonymous played rather well, so definetely not a beginner, but instead an experienced player. The first clear mistake that I can see from Anonymous was when my opponent played 30.c5 which loses a pawn. Actually before that moment came, I was maybe somewhat on the worse side. After I got that free pawn, my game become much easier to play. My opponent tried to get some tactics work on me, but I did notice them quite well in my humble opinion. I think we both started to be quite low on time at this point and my opponent blundered again in the time trouble when Anonymous played 37...Qc7, which gives up yet another pawn. I was in a solid position with two pawns up, so I was very confident about winning the game. Not only that but I was also up in time. On move 40, my opponent ran out of time. I had 1 minute and 19 seconds still left on my clock.