Back from the wilderness!

Well, it certainly has been a while...

The other day I was studying in the library when my friend brought out a small magnetic chess board. Eager to find anything to distract us from boredom of algebraic number theory we took to the board.

Immediately I felt the surge of familiar feelings rush over me; tension, excitement, fear, pride. I won that game, by resignation, but upon analysis it turned out the position wasn't lost, in fact rather the contrary.

It was this that inspired me to return to chess.com; I spend enough time at a PC already, the least I can do is make it productive (which is why I'm replacing time on 9gag.com with time here - I know! What a traitor!).

So I'm back to my old ways, playing with little formal study - I analyse my games lightly afterwards, a sort of post-mortem - trying to pick up a few openings, but mostly just relying on creativity, intuition and (what I believe to be) beautiful play. After all, Dostoevsky wrote "Beauty will save the world", so why not my chess games too!

Here's a position from a recent game I played: solve the puzzle to see how I should have played it out (the way I missed during the game), then follow how I did play it out, using some nifty manouevering to arrive at a beautiful finish to save the game.

Enjoy! 

and now how it actually happened;