Beating A Grandmaster In Classical Chess... With Black! (The Dragon)
For mere mortals like me, beating a chess grandmaster at their own game seemed like a pipe dream at the ripe young age of 13 when I was making my initial foray into tournament chess.
Even as an overconfident teenager, the idea of this seemed so farfetched when I was witnessing the accuracy of the world's top flight of the time. Still, however, I had this niggling thought in the back of my brain saying... one day.
Fast forward 10 years and I found myself facing 2500-rated Australian Grandmaster Justin Tan with the black pieces in the Hjorth Memorial Online Invitational.
Despite having played and beaten many Grandmasters on Chess.com in speed chess, I had yet to beat one in a classical game. To be fair, at this point, I had only had one such classical encounter, against popular Chess.com blogger and Grandmaster Max Illingworth in 2016.
Prior to this game, I had been fueled with conjecture about how Grandmasters were practically unbeatable when they started with the white pieces. Concerned by the seeming infallibility of Grandmasters playing white, I developed a criteria that I figured would help me navigate this tough encounter:
1. Play to win. It sounds obvious however most players that I see and coach go into a shell when they play against a master. Trust your hard work, intuition and play fearlessly. The second you swap to a 'draw' mindset, you risk passivity and ultimately get squashed by a lack of activity.
2. Play an offbeat but 'semi-sound' opening to get said Grandmaster out of their comfort zone (by engine evaluations I tend to look at positions between 0.5-1 down, remembering that if I played an opening that achieves equality early, my opponent would be far better versed in these 'optimal lines').
3. Try to predict my opponents' potential setups using the Chess.com opening explorer prior to the game (using statistics).
4. Understand the WHY in your opening setup/variation. This is where most players go wrong. Playing an opening perfectly for 20 moves doesn't make you the victor. You have to work backwards from the anticipated ending and understand all of the positional and tactical ideas in the expected positions.
5. Be realistic. Expect that your Grandmaster opponent will find the best moves in almost every position so avoid cheap tricks as they rarely work.
Now for the game!
