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The Jalalabad Defense - bad, but not as bad as my blunders…

john4000
| 0

In this game, my opponent played a weird opening, which turns out to be called the Jalalabad Defence. It's a bad looking opening, but my mistakes turned out to be worse than however objectively bad the defence is. This game was 15 minutes with a ten second increment. For the most part I played badly here - I knew that I needed to take advantage of the black king being in the centre of the board, but I didn't trust my calculation skills enough to follow through with an attack. I've looked at some of the lines, and it looks like I should have gone with my instinct and trusted that the initiative would carry me through. In any case, my opponent went wrong in a heavy piece ending, and despite my best efforts to miss the most efficient wins, I came out on top. The most interesting bits of this game by far are the variations which I did not have the guts to follow through with during the game, some of which I've included in the analysis. Notes to self following this game: (1) improve calculation abilities; (2) use the initiative!