On last weekend I played at the Finnish Championships of Team Blitz Chess and discovered that I am very slow at over the board blitz. Even though I thought that I was moving around the same speed or sometimes faster than my opponent, the clock was still adamant that I had less time than my opponent. I played on board 1 of the team I represented and on day 1, the average rating of the people I faced was 1967. The lowest rated opponent on day 1 was 1425 and the strongest of the 25 opponents I faced that day was a player whose rating was 2521. Before the tournament started I was very confident that I can most of the time keep a level of play that I am happy with. However, when the games started it almost seemed like I have not played this game before... It did not help that the chairs we were sitting were really horrible. I was also the one in our team that needed to write the results of each game. It was of course not that hard, but it was a thing that distracted me a bit and I could not really concentrate on playing the games. Now that the explanations are done, I can type about my score. I was only able to get 8 points out of the possible 25, which I was not satisfied with. My rating performance was 1828, which meant that I was not really playing as well as my rating of 1872 would suggest. It was not a horribly bad performance from me, but I was certainly disappointed with it.
On the second and last day of the tournament we played 20 games in the group we got into based on the way our team ranked against other teams on day 1. On day 2 I was able to get more out of myself and ended up getting 10 points out of the possible 20 against opponents, whose average rating was close to my rating. The lowest rated player I faced on day 2 was rated 1757 and the highest one was rated 2088. The highest rated player I was able to win during these two days was rated 2041. My best draw was against a player rated 2023. Both my best win and my best draw happened on the first day interestingly enough. Unfortunately I was not able to maintain a good level of play in all my games. In some games I just gave material too freely and in one particular game I missed a mate in one that my opponent could do... In that game I was up in material and I was only concentrating on keeping my attack going and did not see the counterplay opportunities from my opponent.
Okay, enough for the unrelated stuff and now it is time to concentrate to the game below. This was part of the 100 game practise match I played against a friend of mine. I think we both played reasonable moves until Kojjootti played 6.h4. I am not sure about the purpose of this move because it seems like a bit premature aggression towards my castled king. The move 6.h4 is not a horrible one, but certainly not something I would recommend. I played 6...b6 with the idea of trading the light-squared bishops off the board. The plan was simple and not a good one, but in order to prove that Kojjootti would have needed to play accurate moves, which he was not able to do at that time. I should have played either 7...c5 or 7...Nbd7 instead of 7...Ba6, but because I was able to trade the bishops on my terms, the position was even. Had my opponent played 8.Bxa6 instead of 8.h5, he might have been slightly on the better side of the board. The game went on without any big mistakes until we reached the position below after 15.Bf2.
I am not sure why Kojjootti played that passive move. The pawn on h5 is not under a real threat, because Nxh5 will be answered with Bxe7 and White wins. My opponent played an even worse move on his next move and after 16.Qe2 the position should be completely winning for me. I was able to proceed with the right idea at first, but then I played a couple of sloppy moves that enabled my friend to get back into the game. One huge blunder on my opponent's 21st move made things really bad for him again. After that I was on my way to victory until I made a huge mistake and played 39...Qb2. You can see the position below.
Kojjootti could have won the game in three moves, 40.Qxe6+ Kh8 41.Qxf6+ Kg8 42.h7#. Had I gone to b1 with the queen, I would have had an easy win. It did not matter that Kojjootti was not able to find the fastest mate in the time trouble because in the end he was able to find the checkmate.
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