For this post I am doing something a bit different than usual. The old way has started to seem to me a bit redundant in a way and maybe it has been like that for quite awhile now. I am not sure if this is a better way of doing these, but I am trying to improve on what I have done in the past. Instead of highlighting couple of moments and typing something about them may not be that beneficial since, for the most part, the same things can be seen in the analysis that can be seen in the notation of the game. For this reason I have decided to offer some insight on something that can't be seen on the notation.
The move 1.d4 is the second most played move in my reference database, which if my memory serves me right, is updated up to the end of last year, but not with games that have been played this year. It is something I am going to chance at some point. The move 1.d4 had been played 2119989 games, while the most popular move 1.e4 appeared in 3398062 games. The third most played move was 1.Nf3 and it had been played in 520835 games. My reply to 1.d4 was Nf6, which has been my main move against it in the recent years, but when I first started playing chess, 1...d5 was the move I chose. 1...Nf6 is also the most popular move in my reference database, it was played in 1148366 games and the move I used to play 1...d5 was the second most common move against 1.d4 and it appears in 636012 games. My opponent's second move 2.Bg5 is the third most popular move, it appears in 20422 games. The amount of reference games drops a lot each time one of the players makes a move.
Had my opponent gone with the most popular move, then he would have played 2.c4, which had been played in 353465 games. The second most common move was 2.Nf3, appearing in 139285 games. All three moves have a score over 50%, though only slightly, which means that White has a slightly better chance to win than to draw the game in case I have understood the scoring thing correctly. While my opponent did not chose the most popular moves in his first two moves, I certainly did that according to statistics. To 2.Bg5 I replied by moving my knight to e4, which appeared in 15442 games and it has been played by Garry Kasparov, Shakhriyar Mamedyarov, Sergey Karjakin and Boris Gelfand, for instance. The next move, 3.Bf4, was actually the most popular choice of all the possibilities and it has been played by some notable players such as Fabiano Caruana, Alexander Grischuk, Garry Kasparov and Hikaru Nakamura.
The game continued to follow moves that very strong players had played before as I played the move 3...c5, a move that I probably first saw IM Greg Shahade play in blitz several years ago. The move had been played in 5530 games and Grand Masters like Garry Kasparov and Teimour Radjabov have played it. Kojjootti then played 4.d5, which is the second most commonly seen move in the position, played in 830 games. The most popular move in that position is to play 4.f3 (4334 games) and drive the knight away. The move my opponent chose had been played before by players such as Michael Adams, Christian Bauer, Garry Kasparov and Teimour Radjabov. I continued with the move 4...d6 (172 games), which was the second most played move. The move that was chosen most of the time was 4...Qb6 (860 games). 4...d6 had been played, for example, by Vyacheslav Ikonnikov (rating at the time 2548), Artur Kogan (2590) and Gilberto Milos (2603). The 5th move, Qd3, is a novelty in the position, previously the moves 5.f3 (137 games), 5.Nd2 (29 games), 5.c3 (4 games) and 5.g3 (2 games) had been tried. The deciding mistake of my game was played in the diagram position below. I played 11...Ne5 and my position went downhill in the game continuation 12.Nxe5 dxe5. The exchange of knights resulted in a position where I had blocked the long diagonal for my bishop on g7. Combined with the bad knight at a6 and with less space, I was in bad shape, from which I could not recover from.
The game below was the only one that I was able to find in my reference database that had players where both were rated over 2500.
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