Chess960 SP180

Another chess960 game and this is against the same opponent as in the game I shared yesterday. Both of these games had the same thinking times, but in neither game did the players use as much of the time as would have been allowed or even most of it. This at least was a little bit longer game than the short game I shared yesterday. The game below started on February 1st and finished on February 19th.

Like in many other starting positions, I first make sure that my bishops can be developed to places where I want to put them. The position of the queen determines for me on which side I want to castle, however, the location of the bishops might also contribute to the castling decision. In this particular starting position where the queens are located at h1 and h8, I would never want to castle short but instead I would prefer castling long. Actually in many chess960 starting positions that I have so far covered, I tend to castle long. In chess, I would like to castle short more often than not.

2.a3 is probably not the ideal move to play, but I do want to get my bishop from b1 to a2 because I would like to castle queenside. Therefore I would not like to move my c-pawn to develop the bishop because I think that my king would be less safe on the queenside if I move that pawn. Vladimirmilanovic responded with 2...e6, which seems a bit passive move. Had I been playing with the black pieces, I would have played most likely either 2...Bf5 or 2...Nf6.

I think 3.Ba2 and 3...Nb6 are reasonable developing moves to continue the game. If I would play this game again, I might change my move order a bit. It probably would have been better to play 3.Bf4 and follow that up with 4.Ba2 unless similar thing happens as in this game... I would prefer to play those two moves in that order because the move order in the game allows 3...c6, which would prevent me from playing 4.Bf4. In the game continuation my opponent plays for some reason 4...c6, which loses the game immediately, or at least a piece but when no counterplay is seen as a compensation for the piece, it should be the losing move. In fact, the rest of the game is just a matter of how one wants to win the game. I have added one analysed game to the following posts: C41 Philidor Defense: Larsen Variation, E72 King's Indian Defense: Normal Variation. Deferred Fianchetto, B92 Sicilian Defense: Najdorf Variation. Opocensky Variation and C28 Vienna Game: Stanley Variation, Three Knights Variation. I have also added five mate in three puzzles today.

Game number two. This is a game that was played at lichess.org on April 12th, 2016. The basic time was 10 minutes and there was also a 10 second increment. I think the first move that was not good was the move I played after 2.Nf3. As I now look at the position, I should have played 2...c6, with the idea of 3...d5. Had I been able to do that then I would not have had any problems developing my pieces, except for the queen. The problem piece is the queen on h8 because had I gone for the c6, d5 plan, then I would like to keep my king on the kingside, but as I would have needed to play h6 or h5 to get the queen into play keeping the king on the kingside does not look good to me. I would not like to play g6, because that would open the possibility to the annoying move Bh6+ in some positions. The reason I do not like 2...d6, is that it further blocks the diagonal for my dark-squared bishop.

Tricks_and_botches continued with 3.d4 and now I have to take on d4 with my pawn, because otherwise I lose material or weaken my position further. After 4.Nxd4 I played a6 in order to get my bishop developed to a7. The pawn on a6 also covers the square b5, so that my opponent can't place a knight there. Not that there would be any reason to move the knight there anyway in this position. Then my opponent castled and I played my bishop to a7. I think the only inaccuracy from me up to that point was 2...d6. Tricks_and_botches played 6.e5, the point of which I did not understand at first... Therefore I played the stupid 6...dxe5, which is a blunder that lost the game for me. After 8.Rxd8 I had a knight and a pawn for the exchange, which is not good enough because I do not think that even my slightly better development at the moment compensates for the material loss. The rook on the eight rank is restricting my options to finish my development. My knight can't move from e8 at the moment and my queen on h8 is quite hard to get into the play since playing g6 seems like a horrible idea in view of Bh6. I had to play 8...Nb6 in order to save my knight and after 9.Be3 I had to castle to get away from Bc5+. Then after 10.g3, my position went further down the drain with the move c6. I should have played Nd6 and accepted the fact that I need to trade rooks. Due to the blunder I made in the game, I had to lose another exchange. I bet a lot of people would considered of resigning the game at this point with the black pieces and I did think about it, but wanted to prolong my suffering for some reason. I was able to finally get some play and even got some material back 17...cxd5. After that I was down a mere pawn in material and thought that maybe I can get a draw after all. However, the longer the game went on, it became clear that there is no chance for me to get a draw from this game and I had to resign on move 40.