Last post of the week, unless something unexpected happens, features once again over the board game that was played a bit over eight years ago at a tournament in Helsinki. This is a fifth round game of the Easter tournament that was held there. At this point in the tournament I had won one game, drawn the game below and lost three games, so things were not going so well for me. If nothing else, at least this draw ended my losing streak that actually never even properly started. That is because I had only one loss between a win and this draw. I was able to get a draw and a win from the remaining two rounds, so I finished the tournament having scored 3 points in 7 games. It was enough to barely increase my rating, due to the fact that most of my opponents were higher rated than me.
I do not remember the reason anymore why I chose to play 1...c5 instead of 1...e5 because I almost never play the Sicilian. It might have something to do about the fact that I faced Otto Mäkinen also in my previous tournament and on our previous game I had played 1...e5 and did not get a position that I would have liked to play again. I very rarely change the openings I play because of the opponent I play against, unless I play a longer match against that same player, then I may change things quite a lot. Now that I look at this game, it feels a bit strange seeing myself playing the Sicilian and not being completely awful at it. I think it may have something to do with the fact that I watched quite a lot of chess videos at the time where titled players commented their games or went through games of other players and commented on them. I think those were really helping me to play the game better. I sometimes watched a chess video and immediately after it played some blitz games and tried to take advantage of my newly acquired knowledge. Sometimes the games seemed easier, but maybe more often than not I could not get into similar positions, so the knowledge acquired was not that useful.
The game below is one of those wasted opportunities that I can't believe ended like the way it did. Already on move 10 I started to gain a small advantage, which increased over time, though occasionally due to inaccurate moves, my advantage dissipated a bit. Despite of all this, I did keep my advantage almost the full game, I only stumbled near the end, on my 40th move. It was hard to accept a draw after such a good game, but one mistake is all it takes to spoil even the greatest of games. I am not implying that this would fall under that category though. Until Monday, my fellow chess and chess960 enthusiasts!
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