Chess960 SP273

This was played at ChessRex as a correspondence game. Both players had 4 days to use for each move. However, neither player did use all that much time to make their moves as you might notice from the quality of some of the moves. This game started on December 25th and ended on January 1st, so this is by far one of the fastest correspondence games I have played maybe in years. With the first few moves I lull into sleep and do not recognise the danger that lurks in the position. When my opponent played 5.c4, I started to see the problem of the pin on the c-file that would have enabled my opponent to take on d5 in such a way that I would have lost a pawn. The other pin on the long diagonal also makes it really hard for me to get out these pins. My opponent continues on the right path on the next move, but then misses the move that probably would have won the game for him. Had I seen the move 7.Bxd5 being played, I would have maybe resigned the game right there.

The game continues evenly for awhile until I blunder again on move 10. I played 10...c5 because I had suffered from the pins so long that I thought to get away from the long diagonal pin possibilities while I can. It turned out to be a bad decision. EXTREME was playing for the win again after that. During the game when the white queen landed on b7 I thought that EXTREME would be taking on a7 soon after, but it never happened. Then on move 17, EXTREME throws away his advantage with the move Qd5. I played 17...h6 because I wanted to get my queen to h7 and invade white's position along the light squares. The after game analysis shows that Stockfish prefers to play 17...Rfe8 there and I guess the idea is that if the white queen does not move, then black could take on e5 with the knight due to the fact that the queen is now under attack and the knight is defended, so white does not want to take on e5 with the queen. After I was able to play the move 20...Rd7, I was getting confident again about my chances, because I thought that the immediate problems had been averted. Surviving even this long was a surprise to me after that horrible start to the game. The win started to manifest itself to me when I found the move 24...Rc7+ after that the game is rather easy to play on my side of the board. I have added one mate in two, one mate in three, two mate in four and one mate in five puzzle today.