Chess960 SP626

Last Sunday I played my 5th chess960 game at FICS in a sleep deprived state. It was not a good idea to put my rating points in jeopardy, but for some reason I thought it would go well. For one thing, I did not expect to get a clearly higher rated opponent, because it is something that almost never happens. This is not because my rating would always be all that high when compared to the ratings of other people, however, my Wild rating at FICS was 1995 before this game, which is a reasonably high rating. That Wild rating means in my case a chess960 rating, since it is the only chess variant I have played there. Due to my long period of inactivity when playing chess960 at FICS, my ratings deviation or RD had become quite high, which meant that my rating dropped 112 points because I lost this game. Maybe with the next game I can get back over 1900 and start chasing the 2000+ rating once more.

When I finally got an opponent to play a game, it seemed to take forever, I moved quite fast, so that my opponent would not abort the game. I had already at this point tried to get a game at lichess.org, but there nobody was interested in playing against me with the time controls I would have liked to play with. I spent a few minutes waiting for an opponent there and then switched to FICS. The problem with moving rather fast was that I had not properly looked at the starting position. This had the unfortunate result of me playing a horrible and ill-advised first move against 1.Ng3. The move I chose, 1...g6, is quite bad in my opinion because it blocks the natural development square of the h-knight. I played 1...g6 in order to get my dark-squared bishop to g7, but I realised after the reply 2.b3 that moving the bishop to g7 would be stupid immediately and therefore I had to prepare it by blocking the long diagonal with 2...e5. Had I played 1...e5 and developed my bishop to the f8-a3 diagonal, I might have not wasted so much time to make my silly first move to make some sense. My awful first move had made the development of the kingside pieces much harder than it should have been.

Regardless of the bad start, I should have been only slightly worse and draw could have been still within my grasp. My real problems started when we reached the position below. In that position I wanted to defend the e-pawn with my d-pawn because had I played 5...f6, the bishop on g7 would have seem like a really bad piece. What I did not realise in my sleep deprived state was that defending the e-pawn with the d-pawn can be really bad for me, since it might lead to the opening of the d-file where my king resided. Of course my opponent was more awake and took his or her opportunity to open the d-file with devastating consequences for me. Anandkvs played 6.dxe5 and at this point in the game I had my last chance of saving the game. Had I played 6...O-O-O and sacrificed the e-pawn, I might have survived.

I replied with 6...Bxe5, which turned out to be the losing move. I did unintentionally make the winning easier for my opponent than I should have a few moves later when I played 10...f5. It was answered with the move 11.Bc4, which wins more material by force. I should have maybe resigned at that point, but wanted to prolong my misery for some reason, but a few moves later I had to accept that there was no way I could get even a draw from this game, so I resigned after 15.Qxe5. I have added mate in two puzzles 732 - 734, mate in three puzzle 660 and mate in four puzzle 526 today.