Lucky win against an IM in Chess960

IM scalp in Chess960

Beat an IM rated 2237 in Chess960 (ranked 28th on lichess.org) in a 3+2 game:

Game of the Day #4: The Walk of The King

In this game (as Black), I got a strategically won game very early. At some point, I had all the time I wanted to actually bring my King all the way from the Kingside to the Queenside, in order for the King to protect the a8, a7 and a6 squares and thus taking these squares away from White's Rook. In the meantime, White had nothing better than to move his King back and forth.

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Game of the Day #3

It's very hard to say why I didn't start writing again after my semester has ended, at mid-December. Oh and by the way, Happy New Year!

I played this game earlier today, and although I rarely attack, in this one my opponent allowed for my pawns to advance with tempo, so the pawn storm kind of imposed itself as the only logical plan.

Hopefully I'll post again soon!

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Trap in Torre Attack & Game of the Day #2

As I said in my latest article, I am trying out openings for White that involve 1. d4 and an early Bg5 (the Trompowsky, Torre and Veresov attacks; just for the record, I don't think I like the Veresov very much). I played a game two days ago that involved a Torre Attack (1. d4 d5 2. Nf3 Nf6 3. Bg5), and tried to set up a trap for my opponent who unfortunately didn't fall for it.

I heard of the trap from GreenCastleBlock (Matt Pullin, a USCF expert) on YouTube. The trap starts with 1. d4 d5 2. Nf3 Nf6 3. Bg5 e6 4. e3 Be7 5. Bd3 c5 6. c3 Nbd7 7. Nbd2 b6 (7. ...O-O is also booked) 8. O-O Bb7 9. Qa4 O-O 10. Ne5 (D):

White is hoping for 10. ...Nxe5 11. dxe5 Nd7?? (11. ...Nh5 +/=) 12. Qh4!, and Black either gets mated or loses a Rook. Matt Pullin says in his video that he won two games with this opening at the same tournament in 2000. His video is available here (I strongly suggest GreenCastleBlock's videos on YouTube).

As for me, I wasn't so lucky, but the game that followed was exciting. It's an opposite-castling game, in which both sides attacked. I give a more or less short analysis of the game, with some interesting moves. Here it is:

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Game of the Day #1

Game of the Day will be a new series of articles, in which I will post a game that I played most likely on the same day, or at least in the recent past. Of course, I will try to post interesting games..

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Today's game is interesting in a weird way -- it involves a big blunder. It was a 3-minute unrated game on ICC (3 0 u). I was playing as an anonymous player; and fortunately, my opponent was rated 1171, which is more than a thousand points below my own blitz rating. Otherwise, I would have lost in very few moves :)

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I got interested yesterday evening in a bunch of openings for White, involving 1. d4 and an early Bg5. Namely, these are the Torre, Trompowsky and Veresov attacks. (They should be the subject of an upcoming article.) So I went earlier today on ICC to try some of these out. Unfortunately, the featured game didn't quite follow any of these openings' book lines, so I will have to play some more games eventually.

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In the meantime, here is the game. Put simply, let's just say that I... well, traded my Queen for a Knight. More or less intentionally, in fact -- I just preferred defending my pawn than my Queen, that's all.

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