ROUND 2: A Story of 1. b3

Hello, my fellow Daily chess players, and welcome to the 2022 Chess.com Daily Chess Championship; an online correspondence tournament featuring  over 33,000 players. I manged to advance to the 2nd round of this "prestigious" tourney with a perfect score. The second round however would see a reversal of my fortunes. 

Yet, in truth I never imagined I would actually advance, so instead of worrying about the in and outs of the round, I am going to use this Blog to talk about something dear to my heart...that's right, 1. b3 also known as the Nimzo-Larsen Attack.

Invented by famed chess author Aron Nimzowitsch, further developed by Danish Grandmaster Bent Larsen, dallied with by none other than Bobby Fischer and dare I say, perfected by Indian Grandmaster Adhiban Baskaran.

It is arguably the greatest chess opening of all time, so I decided to play it in every single game...

Without further ado, here are a few examples of the Cowboy's Opening in action.

What did I just say about sacking Rooks...?

Can you take advantage of White's loose pieces...?

What's better, two Rooks or a Queen...?

And now for the feature game.

Unfortunately, the feature game will be about how NOT to play 1.b3, but as they say "We learn more from our losses than our victories.", enjoy.

And that was it, that was round 2 of the 2022 Chess.com Daily Chess Championship. Overall, I enjoyed the experience, but it certainly is a time consuming endeavor; playing 22 games at once can make life a little hectic. Yet, on the good side it did give me 11 chances to play 1.b3...

Thanks for reading, and as always feel free to share these games and memes with your friends down at the Library or Bar.

Cheers, SheldonOfOsaka.