Sicilian Miniature

An interesting game today in my first serious game since returning to chess a few days ago.

As white, I faced the Sicilian Defense and I've never been comfortable with it from either side.  But one of the things I'm working on is deciding an opening system to deal with the major replies, and the only way to avoid the Sicilian is to never play 1. e4 as White.  After thinking a bit, I decided to challenge the dark squares by a fianchetto of the c1-bishop ... certainly not the way White normally does it.  I later found out this is known as the Snyder Variation.  I'm studying this option a little more and the jury's still out in my mind as to whether this is how I'll handle the Sicilian as White in the future. 

Anyway, the opening was interesting and the game was approaching the transition to the middle game when I had one of those blind spots, almost literally handing Black a mate-in-1 which it took advantadge of.  Up to then it had been a good effort from which I can learn significantly, but I still need to work on the psychology of the game.  If you hand me the position at move 11 I don't think there's any way I miss it -- in the game I thought I had everything accounted for and that was totally wrong.