Playing live games at the chess café

(full blog at http://cloclotron.net/chess)

Last night I played 3 games against a chess.com friend at a local chess café. It was great to get back into live chess games after many months of correspondance chess. We played two games at 30+30 time control and another at 15+15. We did not annotate the last one since it was rapid time control. The analysis presented here is our combined ideas we discussed together after the game.

In the first game, where I decided to enter a French defence advance variation to improve my chess culture, I did not find enough counterplay and sacrificed the d4 pawn for an attack that had no real venom in it. The idea of g4 was probably the key to counterplay on the kingside. There are also alot of improvements in the opening for both sides. In the second game my opponent misplayed the Sokolov variation of the Slav defence and I got a dream position, then won a piece and eventually the game. I also won the rapid time control to finish 3/3 for the night, but I got lucky on the first game since my opponent allowed me to mate him!