To weep is to make less the depth of grief

This wasn't actually one of the most moon-howlingly awful games to lose -- the very worst type of game, for me, is where you play brilliantly for 40 moves against a stronger player and then throw it away on move 41 with a tragic blunder.  In this game, I never really had much of a chance after an admittedly fairly tragic blunder on on move 10.  Still, it's my first loss in the first local league match of the season and I'm not best pleased.

There are, as always, lessons to learn.  I don't think that my blunder was particularly down to tactics blindness; it was more a case of not-playing-the-Slav often enough blindness.  Scroll past the game and the puzzle to see what I'm going to do about that.

So what was the winning tactic for white on move 23?  See if you figure out white's next two moves from this position - shouldn't be too hard now that you know to look for it!

LESSONS TO LEARN:

#1 You need to have a good feel for typical positions in your mainline openings

#2 A good way to do that is to get a good book. I've just bought myself The Slav: Move by Move by Cyrus Lakdawala (that man again - see one of my earlier blogs).

#3 One more point about a 'good book' - I think it's a feel for the opening that you are after, and this comes from complete games rather than just opening variations. The blurb on the Lakdawala move-by-move book says it does exactly that, so I'm optimistic!