My Path to FM - Week 8

Sorry I'm late! Life got crazy lol...

This week was pretty interesting.  I played a lot of training games and learned a bunch of new stuff.  It seems that against IM's and GM's, I do fine in openings that I'm familiar with.  I seem to get in trouble in positions where I don't understand the opening (early middlegame) all that well.  I didn't used to do fine, so I'm wondering if I've improved quite a bit in just the last 2 or 3 weeks...

The fix has been incredibly easy.  All I had to do was check my 'awkward' games in the database and I was quickly able to find ideas that I liked.  I used to do this quite a bit but I guess I wasn't quite strong enough to understand the ideas, and so I got caught in the trap of learning 'lines', which is more or less useless because even GM's deviate pretty quickly it seems.

Anyway, here is the most interesting game I played this week.