Iowa Open Games
My game against Richard Rector, started out with the French defense, two knights variation transposed which ended on move 3.
After I noticed that he kept pushing pawns in the opening, I immediately took advantage of the opportunity to get ahead positionaly, by developing my knights and bishops, and tried to trade off his developed pieces for mine. And after the bishop trade on moves 8 and 9, I saw the opportunity to fork the king and rook and focused on it doing exactly what Alex would say and “inviting all the pieces to the party”.
Then I saw an opportunity to get my queen out and look like it was going to “join the party” but really it was going to attack the g7 pawn. I saw the Bf6 move and figured that it If anything, I was getting a pawn out of the whole thing, so I took it; I also had a plan to put him in check with the knight, but I didn’t see the rook at the time, but it all worked out in the end because he made a vital mistake (in my opinion) and took the knight on c3! (I had actually put an exclamation point on the notation sheet) from this point on, I think he made a great array of errors. The next thing he did was not protecting the rook again, and essentially locking my queen in with the rook. But I think that my critical mistake after that move was moving Bd2 and not castling instead, because Bd2 led to Qe5 then Qb5, and my rook was locked in.
But I ended up getting the rook, and getting myy other rook into the game, and he made the fatal mistake of taking my bishop on h6 (move 24) which let me checkmate him.
On move 8 I had the idea of attacking the bishop on d3 (or at least seeming to) and put full force on into protecting my bishop on e4 attacking the bishop on d3; but at the beginning of the attack my plan was to essentially attack the g3 pawn and make it seem like I was just attacking the bishop, but then I changed routes after the bishop trade and focused on attacking the knight as many times as possible to win it; but after rd5, I changed my plan to the old one: attacking the g3 pawn.
I was really just trying to get all of my pieces over to the kings side, or trade my pieces off for the ones on that side, so when I did the ng5 move, he was shocked, and even said “why would you want to trade” under his breath. But of course, he had to make a checkmate threat on d7, so I did one of the two candidate moves I had chosen: qd6 or the chosen one, qc6. I figured if he advanced his attack any more I would trade off queens, and still have my attack on the kingside. After the queen trade I decided to get my bishop in the game, because I saw all kinds of tricks involving it into the game, and decided that I should get it in the game, and it would probably be worth the cost of a pawn; which it was, or would have been, if I hadn’t done the worst move of the game and not seen that I had hung my rook. (my hat was blocking it from view) after I moved my knight back and forth a few times, I got my bishop in the game at the exact right moment, because it led to a king-rook fork. The fork probably would have won me the game if I hadn’t hung my rook, but I did, and then didn’t get my other pieces in the game in time, so I lost, because I didn’t develop my pieces and because of my hat, blocking the bishop from view.
Before the threat of checkmate, I had found a very good threat of nxf7 rxf7 bxf7 kxf7 and, qxc5 winning me a bishop, if only I could have kept that advantage.
After he took the pawn at h2, I saw the qh4 threat, and figured that if I attacked the other knight, then I would be putting him in check, so I would be safe and win the knight, going up another three points.
After that, as predicted, moved his queen to h4, and I moved back to g1,where he then had the mate threat and I lost my queen.
After that, I tried to avoid trades, and develop my pieces, which worked until about move 26, when I decided that I would give anything to get that stupid bishop off the board.
The rest of the game was just downhill from there and I just downright lost.
I started out trying my queen trap with the discovered check in petroff, but it didn’t quite work out,and I ended the attack on move 10.
But as I realized later, I should have realized the attack he had on my kingside earlier, and I paid for that mistake on move 17, when I had to give up my queen.
Nothing more really needs to be said here, he ccompletely demolished me, but luckily for me, it ended 6 moves later, so I didn’t have to go through too much pain.
