Making lemonade and baiting
Once again, I find myself in the position of being needed as a sub in the Art of War intramural 3. This time, my opponent is Kskonge, another one of my favorites. (Who am I kidding? I pretty much love ALL my teammates!). KsKonge and I had an extremely exciting game once that I ultimately lost but it REALLY was an instructive game as it really hit upon the mental aspect of the game and the importance of not panicking. After chasing my king across the board, I worried about a queen and knight combo and sacked my queen. In reality, I had a forcing series of moves that would have led to checkmate. See this game (I still cringe over move 37 by black--AGGGHHH):
http://www.chess.com/livechess/game?id=750284313
So, despite my loss there, it was a HUGELY instructive game and at my level, that's what it's all about. Another nice thing about playing KsKonge (Jon) is that he's got an incredible sense of humor. He absoultely cracks me up. Consider this:
Jon and I were in an earlier intramural match. As we were getting close to finishing, I knew my goose was cooked and even I was looking for ways to mate me. I suggested a few things, none were mate.
Cris Angel: "I suck at mating!"
Jon: "Don't feed me any straight lines!"
Heh heh. This blog is dedicated to Jon who told me that in THIS intramural game, "the position gave you lemons and you made lemonade!" Terrific sport, he is, and always makes for an exciting game when we play.
Jon likes d-pawn openings. For whatever it's worth, I dislike those. I'm going to work on learning some of them. I undersatnd they can be less complicated than the e pawn openings but for right now, I'm relatively unfamiliar with them and don't tend to do well. So my first surprise came at move -- #1 -- when Jon opened wtih the knight. That surprise SHOULDN'T have surprised me, though..... I should know that with Jon, having a surprise is NO surprise!
Well, here we go. Time for some Dream Theater (I'd forgotten how much I LOVE the album Octavarium) and some good focusing. A nice surprise here is that I actually won! As many know, I DO run my games through Houdini but I generally do NOT look at the variations (I like to explore those in an annotation). I just look at the superficial analysis. In this case, I DID look at ONE variation, only because after we finished this game, a few stronger players kind enough to observe discussed a few moves with us and I had a question about a move with my stronger teammate explaining the meaning behind a particular sequence. So, I DID look at that variation. Otherwise (drum roll please), Houdini also gave me a surprise by assigning !! to a move! Wooo and hooooo!!!!! I'll explain more about that when we get there!
Here we go!!
