The Christmas Day Massacre

Greetings all! I am returned from my slothfull dalliance to show yet another massacre I suffered at the hands of XiaoKangChen.

Before everything gets gory, let's catch up. "Where the heck have you been this last month, Jonathan!?" I'm sure you're all wondering. I'll spare you all some reading and show you a picture:

"Nice beard, Man!" Thanks! I've been working on it. Also, if you wondering, the Guiness represents the glaze I made for my Christmas ham, and there are some wonderful green bean inside the foil. Lovely stuff. :)

On a chess note, I've held strong to my commitment to play rated games. My rating's hung out in the mid to low 1600s for blitz which is not amazing but is okay. I've begun to record myself live and post the video to YouTube which has caused me more than normal time troube issues, but I think its going to help me in the long run. Besides, its quite fun!

Here's a link if anyone wants to have a looksy:  jdcannon's YouTube Channel

Greetings out of the way, let's get to the meat:

Defeat of the Day

I've decided to add the Scandinavian to my reportoire. I think it may be the perfect opening for me. Let me explain. I used to play the Caro-Kann but I never liked the advance or the exchange variation, but I dealt with it. Later, an FM I took lessons from suggested that I shouldn't play Caro-Kann because it was only for GMs (bad advice, I think), and recommended that I play the Philidor. That lasted until I learned about the English Hedgehog (What's the Hedgehog got to do with a 1.e4 opening?) It turns out that the Sicilian Kan can directly transpose, and if not transpose leads to similiar type of play... Hence I switched again. But now we have the Scandy! which is very much like the Caro-Kann except no advance or exchange variation!

Happy as I may be with the Scandinavian, I got my tail handed to me in this following game. I failed for a couple reasons:

1. I carelessly lost time on some odd queen sortes, and somewhat carelessly developed my dark squared bishop.
2. I failed to maintain my Light Sqaured Bishop which was my source of a counter play.
3. I didn't recognize the importance of controling c4 which was a weak square in white's camp. This allowed him to free his biggest weakness an left me with nothing to play again.
   
4. I hung my queen. ha!

Check it out for yourself:

It was tough to find a Master Game that showed a good response from Black to white b4 idea. I did manage to find one game that black won, but it had nothing to do with taking advantage of b4; however, I show what I think is the best plan in the notes which is a plan I hinted at the live commentary in the YouTube Video.

I hope you all enjoyed my early Scandinavian adventures perilous though it was. I intend to intergrate my blog and YouTube much more in the future as I think it will be interesting to see how my thoughts during the game compaired to after the game. I'll see you all next time!