Failing to Make the Adjustment

Sometimes in a game the story changes many times. What do I mean by this? When you study the classic games of the masters such as Capablanca or Botvinnik, you often see how one theme such as a weak pawn or advantage in development was the cause for victory. Our hero homes in on the particular element and systemically builds up his game around it until he grinds his opponent down until he resigns. 

To be fair, often chess authors select these types of games because of the instructive nature. It's much easier to illustrate a positional element when you use examples that show the best case scenario. These types of games are instructive and this is why it is important to study the classics.

However, often in our own games, there are many elements playing and due to the many mistakes an inaccuracies we amateur players make, often the specific interplay between the elements of a position shift drastically over just a few moves - or even a single move. Often our path to victory involves being attuned to these changes both through positional understanding and perhaps more often through tactical awareness.

The game I will be sharing with you today offered me many of these "shifts in focus", and although I played several good moves, I also had many missed opportunities. Some of these were tactical oversights as you'll see in my comments, but also I think a part of it involved the failure to come to grips with the changing landscape of the game as I went from playing with a winning attack to maintaining a moderate edge but having to defend. There were both technical challenges as well as psychological factors involved in my defeat.

With that in mind, I'd like to present one such missed opportunity. In this position, my opponent had just played Qc2. I managed to play the 2nd best move, but perhaps you can find the move that would have led to a decisive advantage?