This post has been renamed February 19th, 2017 in order for it to be as accurate as possible. It turned out that when I checked the opening played in this game with Deep Fritz 14, this game followed theory up to the move 9.Qxd4. Actually, Deep Fritz 14 classifies this opening as C62 Spanish Game: Steinitz Defence, but because it gives the same name to some other lines, I had to include the number of moves in the title and try to get the games divided correctly into the posts. The game below was played in the second round of the WORLD OPEN RAPID tournament. The tournament was played at the FIDE Online Arena on March 18th 2015. My start was quite good, two wins in two games, so everything went according to plan at that time. I may be happy with the results so far but not for some of the moves I played in these two rounds. I would like to play accurate moves and not give my opponents chances to win, but that is sometimes too much to ask, especially in a rapid game.
My opponent was able to hang on in the game up to the position below, but then saviola played 9...a6 and he or she ended up in some real trouble. Black does not have time to play these kind of slow moves. I do not know the purpose of the move since b5 is already covered with the queen and my knight is prevented from jumping there. Maybe the move allows to move the a-rook. However, preparing the move O-O-O is unlikely since it seems to be a horrible idea because the king is not actually safe on the queenside, at least in my opinion.
It would have been a better idea to play 9...Be7 and prepare castling kingside. I should have played one of the following moves, 10.Bf4, 10.Rd1 or 10.Bg5 in reply, but I played 10.Re1 instead, which was a bit sloppy reply. I remained on the better side of the board, of course, but only slightly. Saviola then played 10...c5, starting the positional downhill once again. This time, however, I was up to the task of taking the advantage with the move 11.Qd3. Saviola's 11th move, O-O-O, only made things worse for my opponent. After castling to the queenside saviola's position was lost. While I did not play the best possible moves after that I did not allow my opponent back into the game again. I have to admit, I missed a mate in one once again in the position below.
It is somewhat embarrassing that I did not see the move 26.Qd4#, but luckily I was not the one defending the position, so I got my chance to end the game a few moves later in my favor. The game ended in mate with the move 29.Rc7#. I have added one game to the post C41 Philidor Defense. I have also added some of the commentary to the other games in that post, to maybe improve the quality of the post a bit.
Game number two. This is from the 2014 August Grand Seven Fourteen II tournament that is still in progress at Red Hot Pawn. This group of 21 players is a really mixed group of beginners and advanced skill level players. The lowest rating that a player has in this tournament is 922 and the highest is 1913. It does take interest off from some games as there can be really huge gaps between the skill level of the two players that are playing in this tournament. Luckily there are players closely rated to both the weakest and strongest player so that there might be some interesting games to be seen.
The game started to go wrong for my opponent in the position below where OneThird played 9...a6. OneThird should have played 9...Be7 in order to stay in the game.
OneThird's position went further downhill with the move 11...b5 in the position below. Playing 11...Be7 would have been the recommended move once again. Stockfish 8 64 POPCNT thinks that I should have a winning advantage after the 11th move played by OneThird. At first I responded with a decent move 12.Rfe1, but my next move 13.e5 in reply to 12...Be7 threw most of my advantage away.
The next blunder that could have allowed me to take the winning advantage was played in the position below. My opponent castled short, which would have allowed me to play 15.Qxd7 and follow it up with 16.Rxe7 winning a piece. While that idea seems obvious to me now, I did not play that in the game for some reason. I played 15.Qe2 and I ended being slightly worse because of that.
OneThird made a huge mistake in response with the move 15...Rfe8 and I managed to find the strongest reply 16.Rd1, after which I had the winning advantage again. OneThird's 15th move was not the losing move because I threw my advantage away in the position below by playing 25.Nxc5. The move that I should have played was 25.Nd6. It is the strongest move according to the engine.
The game continued with the moves 25...Bxc5 26.Rxg7 Kxg7? The 26th move by my opponent was the starting point for the final downhill for OneThird. My opponent resigned after 41.b3 in a position where I had five pawns and a king and my opponent had two pawns and a king.
