OTB degoschalm

OTB game dego schalm Peter Jaap

A thrilling game of chess.
I faced off against Jaap in a Giuoco Piano, Four Knights Variation match. My initial intentions were to play an Italian Game, but the unexpected pressure from Jaap's central knights made it difficult for me to execute my strategy. Despite the advantage in pieces and pawns held by Black, I managed to maintain my focus and stay in the game. I tried to stick to the idea of a diagonal attack though eventually it never came to that, the play of knights and queens became more decisive and eventually the main focus of the game.
The game was a strategical back and forth battle, with both sides making aggressive moves and trying to gain the upper hand. However, a blunder by Jaap (I got lucky) at move 33 allowed me to seize the opportunity and win with a checkmate.
I think may be caused by the time pressure and because due to the queen knights battle going on, the focus came too much on it. Though this is not strange I think this is how we people play. We have ideas and often stick to them, quite long as I wanted to go for a diagonal attack, which never came to be. And in such a spiral of thoughts, we need to stay sharp and rethink our overall ideas.

In defense of both players, the game
As for white
As for my white play yes I got lucky in the end (chess.com thinks its a genius move), some said I lost too many pawns, and yes I did lose a bit more than I wanted, though the idea for me was to keep attacking and removing pawns can activate the minor pieces often.
( Like in the Danish gambit accepted (in which white offers d4 and c3 ).
In all honestly, my chances of winning this were quite dim and I realized that I spotted some white mistakes or opportunities after I played some moves that my opponent luckily did not see. But it is a human game and so the psychology of a match plays a role too.
I tried to keep my nerves calm which even failed a few times here in this match (shaking hands and almost knocking my glasses off).
As for black
Two knights centrally on the board performing a deep striking area in white territory.
That's a strong play, also taking away quite some pawns with it. It was a strong position though a main attack, or push, could not be combined and breakthrough white's position. White in this sense played disrupting and still kept the pressure on the board.
To give some idea of the pressure for black the last move pre-calculations took about 20 minutes, black would run out of time and could not plan ahead endlessly, and by feeling this time pressure made some wrong moves in the end. White calculating maybe less deep had more time left.

It was the first win against Jaap, he is a strong player who also is teaching the young ones and maintains the degoschalm website so all my respect to Jaap.

Another thing I like to note is that although I learn openings a lot, this midgame position I had not studied it a lot, but I have seen it often in Italian games, after watching the youtube below Jaap stuck longer to the correct moves (not sure if he was aware of it as the play is quite natural to move as well for black), my a3 was for white the end of this opening. As I lacked the transposing ideas and attacks that should come after the position.

This game had a Giocco Piano four knights position


Below a GM is explaining for both black and white the strategy ideas that can be played after it.