Chess960 SP207

I think the time has come to do some serious maintenance to the blog again. This time, however, I can't say for certain when it will be done. I will go through all my old posts where I have used Chessbase 12 to publish my chess games and republish those games using the Chess.com game viewer. This is necessary because the old posts will not work properly in HTTPS otherwise. I previously thought that I would have enough time to do the maintenance in addition with the normal posts, but in practice I have not really been using that time for maintenance, but for other things. Therefore I need to take the time to finish what I have started in this way. When it is finished, I can publish all the games that I have missed in chronological order because they have been from a previously published opening variations. Those skipped games have been bothering me for some time now and now there are so many of them that I feel its something that is long overdue. While I can't say for certain how long it will take me to do all the updates I want to do, it is unlikely that I would be able to get back to regular posting schedule next week. As soon as I have done all the updates, I will start doing these blog posts again.

Now for this short game you can view below. I did not think during the game that 2.c3 is a good move, but it still was a playable move. I dislike the move 2.c3 because the pawn just gets in the way of White's other pieces. It takes a good developing square away from the b-knight and it blocks the long diagonal and therefore may be in the way of the queen that resides on a1. The first time my opponent really went wrong was after 3...d6. In the position below, my opponent, GStratZ played 4.Bd4. It was an interesting idea in my opinion. I thought about taking the bishop for some time, but then realised that it probably was not a good idea because it would open up the c-file for the rook and allow my opponent to develop a knight to c3. Therefore I did not take on d4 as it would only help GStratZ. The move I played in reply, 4...e5, seems to be the best alternative according to Stockfish 7 64 POPCNT.

The position should only slightly favor me, so draw would be still the result with accurate play. The position below is taken after 5...Nd7. GStratZ played 6.b4, a move that continued the positional downhill that my opponent was on. I could not properly understand the reason behind this move when I saw it played during the game, but the idea behind it may be to prevent Nc5 and get some room for the queen to activate itself.

The game probably was not completely over after 6.b4, but the situation for my opponent became quite dire. With the next two moves by GStratZ, 7.h3 and 8.c4, the game went to become really hopeless for my opponent and the game quickly ended after that. I have added a mate in one puzzle 529, a mate in two puzzle 757, a mate in three puzzle 676 and mate in four puzzles 539 &540 today.