Eight o' clock chess

So this week was round 4 in T88 and I was pretty happy to arrange to play my game at a normal hour......8 pm on Friday. My game was the second game of the match and to my delight I discovered my teammate  Aromas won his game earlier in the day, so if I win my game we would just need 1 draw in the following two games to win the match.....which would be a sweet spot to be.

     As usual my basic preparation was to look at my opponent's game history and make some educated guess about what he might play against me. I noticed he played a lot of e5 against e4 lately so some kind of e4-e5 game is what I was expecting. Since I had white I had a lot of options as to what to play. Normally I either play one of the main lines of the 4 knights or the Italian......mostly the Bb5 line of the 4 knights.

          However, recently there has been a bit of a shift in my approach to chess. I used to mostly play the same openings over and over again. I studied them deeply to avoid unpleasant surprises. I will still do this occasionally but now I am more attracted to a different approach.

           This new approach is to play a lot of different openings and rely more on middle game, tactical and endgame skill to win games. With this approach in mind I decided to play an opening I never played before in a serious game: the Belgrade gambit. In Mikhail Tal: My life and games by Mikhail Tal, I remember reading that Tal's first win over a grandmaster was in the Belgrade gambit. That game was sort of an inspiration to me simply because Tal played it. I don't really remember how that game went exactly. My preparation to play it simply consisted of watching GM Simon Williams DVD four Knights: rocket repertoire. Anyway here is the game. I don't think I played very well but I think at least one of my mistakes is an instructive one. I put a note in case anyone wants to learn from that mistake.

Well.....I somehow won that game anyway. My win helped put our team up 2-0 in the match with 2 games remaining. Unfortunately we lost game 3. we had black in this one and it can be a lesson in king safety when having the material advantage. Take a look.

Then the last game was supposed to be today but the opponent was a no show. According to the rules we can claim a win by forfeit. However, our guy prefers to play so the game may still happen. Hopefully I can give an update in my next post.

              Oh speaking of updates.....If we win this match we will be tied for second in the standings and only half a point behind the leader. Next week is the final round of the regular season and the top 2 teams play for the championship. Even if we draw this current match , we will still have a chance since we play the top team in the last round. It is possible that it could come down to tiebreaks. Anyway........wish us luck