Chess960 SP48

The game I am sharing today was played earlier today at lichess.org. This was played as a 15 minute rated game. Due to this game, my rating climbed to its newest peak of 1918. The first mistake of the game in my opinion was when my opponent decided to play 4.Nc3. The reason why I think it is a mistake is that it makes the bishop on b1 a horrible piece for quite some time. It would have been more logical to play 4.c4, so that the light-squared bishop has a better chance of doing something useful in the game. I replied with 4...Nc6, which I thought was the most natural developing move. MouseSlip then played 5.Nd5 in order to get the knight to a better square and allow the c-pawn to advance to c4, so that both bishops are a bit more active. The downside of the move is that it is the second time in a row when my opponent moved the knight. While in some situations the knight can be a bit menacing on d5, I do not think that it does all that much there just yet. I think my next move 5...Qd6 was a very important move that allowed me to get my pieces as active as possible. Had I played my knight from c8 to e7 first, then it would have been more difficult for me to get my pieces developed. The queen would have been stuck on f8 for a longer time and that would have disrupted the activation of the rooks. My opponent obviously had different ideas on how to handle the position. MouseSlip's queen went to e2 on move 6, enabling castling and also preparing to move the queen to g4 and generating some threats against my king.

I thought about two moves on my 6th move, 6...Nd4 and 6...N8e7. I ended up playing the latter move because I did not think that Nd4 would accomplish anything useful. The move 6...N8e7 is an actual threat against the knight on d5. Therefore, at long last, MouseSlip played 7.c4. After the c-pawns double square advance it would be a bad idea for me to take the knight on d5, so I went with my other knight to d4 and tried to keep the initiative. It was answered by 8.Qg4 with the idea of getting something aggressive done on the kingside. However, the queen is a bit susceptile to attacks on g4, like we see in the game a bit later on. Had I not been careful, the move Nf6+ might have been a problem at some point during the game. Seeing that there was no problem as long as the queen or something else other than the pawn covered f6, I just castled short, without any real fear of moves like Nf6+. Then it came time for my opponent to play 9.O-O, which interestingly enough could have been the losing move. Had I gone for the right plan that is. The move I played 9...f5 was a good move, but 9...Nxd5 would have been much better. MouseSlip continued by playing 10.Nxe7+, which I thought was a mistake. Then again the reason why my opponent took on e7 was that MouseSlip wanted to keep the material balance. Unfortunately for my opponent, it was no longer possible to do that. I took back with my rook, which was replied with the losing move 11.exf5. I did think about different moves before I realised that 11...e4 wins at least a piece for the pawn, but because MouseSlip retreated with the knight to c1, I was able to finish the game with 12...Qxh2#. I have added mate in one puzzles 506 - 508, mate in two puzzle 725 and mate in three puzzle 647 today.

I have also made a video where I did a live commentary of this game and it can be seen below.