Learning from Lucky Wins

One way that I want to improve this year is to develop my tactical vision and ability to calculate during the middle game. The game below is one of my top wins of the year - taking down an 1800+ rated player. However, I realized after analyzing the game using the chess.com engine that what I thought was a brilliant sequence of moves was actually a series of blunders that my opponent failed to take advantage of. Somehow, even though we were on different continents both literally and in terms of skill, we both narrowly focused on my attacking pieces and failed to spot how a simple move by a poorly placed rook would have clarified the situation in favor of my opponent. 

My big takeaway from this game was that if you're attacking, ideally you're making forcing moves, but when you're not, it's key to consider as many variations as possible. Just don't consider one or two moves from the key pieces. Rather, try to consider what would happen if your opponent allowed you to capture the piece your are attacking and how their counter will impact the game as a whole. You'll see in the analysis below that not only is 14. Nxc6 a blunder as my knight can easily be recaptured by the queen instead of the knight as actually happens in the game, but my next move is equally poor. The once revered knight that captures the pawn on d5 is easily thwarted by the humble rook, who slides one square over to e8 squashing all dreams of a pin or winning material as quickly as the illusion popped into my head. 

Luck for me, my opponent fell into my trap as I hoped he would, however as Jeremy Silman points out, the word "hope" should never be in a chess players vocabulary. Honestly, I wasn't even hoping, I just didn't even realize there was an alternative, but that makes the mistake even worse. Not only was I lucky, but I was also careless. Below is the game starting where the action picked up: