Chess960 SP887

64 square madness that some of us call chess... Has now 1400 analysed chess games!! The 1300th game was added March 10th, so the madness keeps growing in a decent pace! Interestingly enough then the main post was called E04 Catalan Opening: Open Defense, Tarrasch Defense, to which I added one analysed game today. I have also noticed that my statistics keep getting worse over time. I remember a time when I had over 64% win rate in the games I had added to the blog, now it is only 57.64%. That being said, also the average rating of the people I play against has been steadily increasing in my correspondence games, which probably makes me lose games more frequently than in the past. Out of those 1400 games I have been able to get 807 (57.64%) wins, 149 (10.64%) draws and 444 (31.71%) losses. Those 1400 games feature 497 different opening variations and next week we shall see what the 500th opening variation will be.

This game was played at lichess.org a few days ago. I have a really bad score against 1800+ rated players at lichess and this game did not really improve those statistics. The basic time for this game was 10 minutes and 10 seconds were added to the clocks with each move. Lately when I have played these rapid chess960 games in order to get something to post on the blog, I have played really awful games and I think this one can be added to that list. I think I played well the first six moves, but then I started to make things too difficult for me... The problem started to be the e4-pawn, which I needed to defend in an awkward way. I think it would have been an easier position for me to play, had I just played 7.Nxe6+ instead of 7.Nf3, because the knight from e6 jumped annoyingly to f4 later on. Well, actually the move N1d2 was the one that started the problems for me because it allowed Nf4. Had I played 8.Qc1, I would not have needed to worry about Nf4 because my queen would have covered that square. The positions after this continued to favor my opponent until poh59 played 13...Bf5. According to Stockfish, I could have had an equal position had I played 14.Qf1. To me it looks a bit wierd move to make, but I guess it makes some sense because the knight on h3 has no good squares to go to and adding pressure to it seems like a good idea. After 17...O-O-O, I could have played 18.Nxf5 and I may have had a fighting chance in this game, but I decided to play 18.Kf1 because I did not want to allow Re8. However, after 18.Nxf5 Re8, I could play 19.Nxd6+, which would win the game for me. So, I was worried about Re8 for no good reason. Because I played Kf1, Re8 was a good move. I continued with the huge blunder Qh6, which lost the game very quickly. I have added one analysed game to these posts: D30 Queen's Gambit Declined: General, E04 Catalan Opening: Open Defense, Tarrasch Defense, D37 Queen's Gambit Declined: Three Knights Variation. General and D60 Queen's Gambit Declined: Orthodox Defense. I have also added one mate in two, one mate in three and three mate in four puzzles today.