Defeating a GM (Without Knowing It)!

After a long break from blogging due to a lot of work on other fronts, I am back with a small post about my weirdest chess experience, which happens to also be my most significant chess achievement so far.

As regular readers of this blog know, I am not a professional chess player by any stretch of the imagination. I have started late, and while I want to improve, I have no ambition to become a master. Playing against a GM is already an incredible honor for someone like me. Winning, even on low time control, is an unachievable dream. Or I should say "was" an unachievable dream!

Indeed, I have done it, and without knowing it!

A few days ago, I received a private message from @Ro_Silva, a Brazilian chess.com member who follows my blog. He also happens to be a follower of GM Evandro Barbosa: a popular Brazilian GM with a growing following on YouTube. 

I don't speak Portuguese, so I am not 100% sure what happened. But from what I've been told, GM Barbosa was doing a speedrun in 10m format. Playing with a secret account on chess.com, he did and recorded games which he analyzed in real-time, giving advice and explaining his train of thought.
When he was around 2152, he came across me. I played black, defended with the Caro-Kann in the advance variation… and won!

On top of the game above, you can find GM Barbosa's video here. But you do need to speak Portuguese to appreciate it fully.

As you can see, the game is full of mistakes on both sides. I went for a sacrifice he didn't decline early on, and then it became very tricky very fast.

I have no illusions: I got lucky. I must have caught him on a bad day, and if we played 20 more games, I would lose all 20 of them. But n addition to luck, I also won because:

• He took the time to explain his opening choice to his youtube audience and got in time trouble toward the end.
• The game was sharp, and, perhaps counter-intuitively, sharp games increase the chance of an upset.
• I didn't know he was a GM.

Now, I want to focus on this last reason because I think this is the lesson from this game for amateur players like us. I am convinced that I wouldn't have proposed the knight sacrifice if I knew he was a GM. I would have assumed he calculated it all precisely and wouldn't have taken the risk. More importantly, I would have got into my head, stressed about having a chance to beat a GM, and made even more mistakes.

I didn't do any of that. Instead, I played the position and not the player (obviously, since I didn't know who the player was).

Again, I am fully aware of how lucky I have been in this game. But I couldn't have been lucky if I panicked and started assuming my opponent couldn't make a mistake.

I am not sure how this advice can translate to real life. Playing GM without knowing it is not something one can manufacture. But this small anecdote does highlight the importance of playing the position and not the opponent.

If you play against a higher-rated player, try to forget it. Keep calm, move some pieces, try to have some fun, and remember:

• Everyone makes mistakes and,
• Upsets do happen.

I want to close this post by highlighting how amazingly cool the modern world can be.

On a Tuesday afternoon, after a long day of work, being frustrated by my research going nowhere, I opened a chess.com tab and pressed the big green "play" button. A second later, I was moving some pieces of a virtual board, playing with someone I knew nothing about. I assumed he was Brazilian from his flag and somewhat similar to me because we had roughly the same Elo on chess.com. Twenty-minute later, I closed the tab. I just won a hard-fought game and was much happier than before.

At the same time, somewhere on the other side of the world, a Brasilian GM was smiling and graciously admitting defeat against an opponent he was sure to crush 999 out of 1000 games.

While I forgot all about it, he uploaded a video on youtube. Ten thousand Portuguese-speaking chess lovers clicked it to listen to a great chess player commenting on an exciting game.

One of them read the opponent's username and thought: "wait… this rings a bell" (although he probably thought it in Portuguese). Minutes later, he found one of the blog posts he read a while ago and confirmed it was me. Then he thought (again in Portuguese): "let's take a minute of my time to inform him." Note that this guy doesn't know me. He has nothing to gain by telling me this. But he thought that, perhaps, doing so would make a stranger on the other side of the world happy for a minute or two.

And he was right.

In the word of Louis Armstrong: What a wonderful world!