My lucky night: Wins from inferior positions.

     I don't expect this to be any good, and these games are riddled with the mistakes of a tired player, but bear with me, and you shall see what happens if you don't keep hold of your advantages.

     I seem to be living up to the bird that the name Firefalcon brings to mind tonight, rising from my ashes from some pretty sucky positions.  I started playing some long games unrated after 9:00 P.M.  In the first game, I tried the Queen's gambit, got some pieces stuck on the queenside, made some less than stellar rook moves, and after that my opponent gained a passed pawn.  Fortunately he went for the pawn instead of taking the knight that I had just hung.  There is a reason that I was playing unrated at this point.  >_>

     The two mistakes that I could see him make were not taking my dropped knight and leaving his king immobile during the endgame.  The king's worth goes up by quite a bit during the endgame, so my king vs. his knight didn't leave me too terribly far behind.  And then his knight was locked away on the lower queenside, and he had nothing left to save his king with.

In the next game, I lost an exchange and was pressured by strong rooks from white.  However, white neglected to deal with my passed pawn.

      My opponent was so focused on trying to trick me into back row trouble that he didn't take care of my passed pawn like he quickly should have.  The lesson here is to take care of your opponent's threats instead of trying to use a trick for an easy win.  This cost him the game.

     Afterwards, at around 11:00 P.M. (When I really am too tired to play good chess.)  I played a couple of blitz games with a fellow who doesn't play a lot of blitz, but is around 50 points within my standard rating.  Judging from the structure of that previous sentence, I'm probably too tired to be writing this as well. x__x

     What my opponent failed to do in this game was take advantage of my blunder soon enough, and then he didn't push his advantage when he had a very solid one.  He also traded down to his disadvantage and then failed to adequately defend because he had a strong attack going.

My opponent had a large advantage in that game, but failed to push it.  The moral here is to never let your large advantage let allow you to miss your opponent's threats, and to never defend against a threat carelessly, even when you are winning.  It could be the difference between a win and a loss.  Now I need to take my own advice, so that I don't carelessly end up like this again.....

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