Chess960 SP37

The game below was played today and because of this game my chess960 rating climbed its way to 1911, which is my new peak rating in this variant. The game began with normal moves 1.e4 e5. Then my opponent tried to play d4, so I tried to make it as difficult as possible for Martolod. However, after 4.Qe3, it became clear that I can no longer prolong the fight against d4. On move 5 Martolod would be able to finally play d4. I played 4...d6 in order to both open the diagonal for my light-squared bishop and also to add more protection to the e5 square. I had planned that when d4 comes, I will take it with my e-pawn, so that my bishop on f6 might control more squares than it would when the e-pawn blocks its path. Then on my 6th move I was forced to play Nb6, in order to prevent the move Qxa7 after d5. When my opponent played 8.f3, it seemed very hard for me to come up with a good plan. I would have liked to open some lines, but it seemed to me that there was no good way to do that. I ended up playing 8...Qe7 with vague ideas of playing Bg5 at some point and clear the way for the f-rook and move the rook so that I would have the option of castling short if need be. I did not want to castle long as that seemed very risky. On my next move I finally moved my light-squared bishop, only to see the reply Na5 and back to c8 my bishop went. I basically allowed my opponent to freely get his or her knight to a5. I should have played 10...c5 instead because taking the b-pawn would have been a huge blunder for my opponent as you can see in the notation.

Losing a move in this closed position was not luckily all that bad and I remained in the game even after the bishop moves. The first really bad move came when Martolod played 16.Na4. It would have allowed me to play 16...Nxd5 and I could have been on my merry way towards winning the game. I think I was down on time at this point in the game and could not think of a proper plan. Therefore I played the horrible 16...Nxa4 and allowed my opponent to get back into the game. The position after 18.Rc2 started to look so awful for me that I thought that I might lose this game. I was not going to resign anytime soon though. Had my opponent been able to get a decisive material advantage or been close to delivering checkmate, then I could have resigned. When I saw the move 19.Qa7, I started to see some possibilities for me to generate some play starting with 19...Bxd2 and following it up with Qg5 and Nf4. The unfortunate mistake of moving the f-rook to f2 began the downhill for my opponent from which there was no coming back. However, it was not the losing move. The move that lost the game was 22.Nxb7 because it allowed my queen and knight to run rampant on the kingside. I have added mate in two puzzles 716 & 717, mate in three puzzles 645 & 646 and mate in four puzzle 514 today.