My Eighth Game of the 2013/14 Season - Another WIN with 1.b3!
Today I played on board 6 with the white pieces for 'Didcot 1' in our OCL Division 2 clash against 'Cowley 3' and same as last week, I had no hesitation playing the Nimzo-Larsen attack and I faced an opponent also graded 122 ECF same as me, but he was an 11-year old quickly-improving junior with a rapidplay grade of 133 ECF (1714 FIDE equ.) so this game wasn't gonna be a walkover.
Or was my experience in the opening and active strategical ideas in almost every line, enough to gain the full point!? Here's the carnage...
As you can see, despite missing a mate-in-1 I think I played a strong game, but kudos to my opponent too because despite being down a lot of material, he really made me work for the win.
Analysis with 3 different people has already been done on this game so I know there were multiple minor inaccuracies in my endgame technique but I already know that's an area I need to continue working hard on.
As a team the match was a draw, 3-3 so I was 1/2 people who won on our team and this game puts me on 6/8 this season and still unbeaten and now with a current season performance of 147 ECF (1826) which is 200 Elo above my actual rating!! Improvements are still nice and steady which is how I want the next few years to carry on
Please feel free to make constructive comments or ask any questions. The opening I played I am very booked up on and have went over many Grandmaster games so know lots of main lines and sidelines and where to take the game out of the opening. But I know my biggest flaw at the moment is my endgame technique, which is actually where I missed the mate-in-1 lol ha.