Nova Daily - 1 January 2025

Hi!

Happy New Year everyone!

The first game of the year is in. It turned out to be a win, but I don't feel I played a particularly good game.

For prep I did about 200 basic endgame puzzles and dozed off. When I had regained my consciousness I went on with my first game of the day. I'll present that game with my thoughts here first.

The Post-Mortem check:

The Aftermath check:

What should have been a straightforward game turned out to be pretty messy overall. I left some things hanging, and my calculations were not up to par.

What can I take away from this game:

1. 5.Nxf6+ is white's only real try against the 4...Nf6 line; everything else is suboptimal for white. The path that I took was good and approved by the authors that did cover this line. However, I played a few suboptimal moves in 10...Bd6? (10...Qb6!) and 12...Nd5? (12...e5! or 12...Nb6!). My opponent helped me by castling queenside and placing his bishop on b3.

2. My calculations were off by a mile. I missed the finisher in the line following the pawn sacrifice 15...Nf6, I missed 18...f5!, and strangely I missed 24.Bxa4. I'm considering playing longer games; so far these games for my blog have been 10+0.

3. The Carlsbad centre following 13...cxd5 would have been better if white's light-square bishop had been off.