My Memorable Games: 2020
Hey Chess Friends,
2020 was a strange year for my chess growth. I played nearly no over the board games, but thousands of games on Chess.com. Now I'm looking back on the year and sharing a few highlights.
Best Mating Attacks:
Not a great game, but a fun finish.
A Morphy style finish...
Boden's Mate
Legal's Mate
Best Opening Prep
I'm not particularly an opening expert, but I do follow chess news. That helped me improve on a Magnus Carlsen game the next day. The following game isn't amazing play, but it was fun to play a key novelty on move 16.
Traxler/Wikes-Barre Variation - I played a few memorable games in this insane opening. The main line here is just a complete refutation of my opponent's mistake on move nine. Check out the notes for a wild draw with former title Challenger, Sergey Karjakin.
A pretty final move: I played the following Stonewall-style attack a few times this year. This one had the cutest finish.
My favorite positional effort
This one was maybe my best non-attacking game of the year. I was able to sacrifice a couple of pawns to trap my opponent's pieces on the back rank and using mating threats to win a piece.
I hope you enjoyed these. Feel free to share your favorite games from the year in the comments.
Here's to a better 2021.
NM Jeremy Kane is the Instructional Content Manager for Chess.com, and the author of several courses in the Starting Out series, Queen’s Gambit Accepted, Trompowsky, and Tarrasch.