Chess.com 2024, 2nd round, E03 - Picking up pawns
19th of March 2024
No new results since last night.
Hartz has woken up unfortunately and resumed making moves against me. I’ll speed up his games for now.
I got my first blunder gift from Vedant who has graciously given me a bishop:
This one can soon go on auto-pilot mode.
The knockout tournament has come alive. As planned, I’m not going to treat it as a priority: https://www.chess.com/tournament/evergreen-warriors-25th-quick-knockouts-chess-tournament
Moving to oioki black game. Yesterday, I was earmarking Qc7-b6 in the position below:
With the queen eyeing f2, it should make white’s designs of occupying e5 more difficult.
The question is what White can do instead, and what are my plans beyond Qb6? White can push for b2-b4; after all, he played a3 for a reason. He can play Rc2 to protect f2 and b2 pawns. Out of these two Rc2 seems like the more solid move, so I’ll analyze that.
One option is Bg6 as per my original plan, to exchange my poor bishop and remove the menace on d3. However, that plan is going to lose my e6 pawn:
There were three issues in the line above.
If white goes Rc2, black has the excellent resource Nxf3, which is a very common theme in the Tarrasch; as someone who played it many times, I should have considered it.
If the line were continued by just one move, it would show that black gets the pawn on d4, so no material gets lost.
The Bg6 idea is still bad for black, since white can play Qd3 and get massive initiative.
Net-net, the decision was right, but all the ingredients in it were not.
Another option is to go Kh8 to threaten the d4 pawn, which is a common goal in the Tarrasch mainline. This looks much better:
Agreed, this was much better. Nxf3 was still the way to go at the end of that line, but the rest of it makes sense.
By the way, I noticed that Ne5 is impossible anyway due to d4 hanging, which deflates confidence in my previous calculations.
Later in the day, have a bit of time to look at the white oioki game.
The d4 pawn is hanging right now, and the h3 pawn will be hanging if the knight goes to f3, so I have to be extra careful. From far away, I was planning Be3, but now I have to verify that the h3 pawn won’t be lost. There are some very interesting lines here:
While I might be missing something, it all looks positive for white, so an immediate g5 from black is not working. What about Nf4? d4-d5 looks like an interesting option.
However, the more I look at the lines the less they add up. This puts the entire Be3 move under a question mark:
I was correct to be wary of Nf4, but white had good options with Rad1 and Kh2. What I didn’t see is that if white knight goes to g6, it does not get trapped, as Rf6 gets refuted by Ne5. Very tricky.
The alternatives are Ne2 and Rd1. After a long think I decide to go for Ne2, as the knight is not doing much on c3 anyway, plus it prevents the pesky black knight from going to f4.
However, at the last moment I notice a few nasty options for black, starting with Ba6. So, after a long (too long!) think, I decide for Rd1.
This was one of the longest move considerations in my entire chess practice!
In the end, I landed on the best move, though for some reason I kept missing the Nf5 option in many of the lines above despite pointing it out early on in the Be3 calculations.
Picking up a game I haven’t zoomed in on before.
Black is surely messing up with me here, as he granted two tempos with the knight shuffling back and forth. I played 0-0 for now, but will need to think soon on how to exact punishment.
Oioki made his move in the white game – it is c6-c5, which I briefly looked at:
Be3 is the natural reaction here, though I can also try Na4, or even Nd5. In fact, I’d rather start with those moves, since exchanging Bc1 for the beast on b6 is not ideal. Nd5 looks very good, as it also has the side effect of taking f4 from the knight – in a much better way than Ne2.
All of this makes sense, with the caveat that I again did not see the cool idea with Ng6-e5. My idea was second best.
21-40: MissionaryKyle started timing out all of a sudden – before he was playing at machine gun speed. Probably the two losses to oioki deflated him.
Both games ended on move 8, so not much in the way of analysis; though in my white game, the engine does not like my Na3 experiment.
Either way, 14 games left.
The white Vedant game is firmly in the conversion phase – I can almost see a mate there. In the black game, he just gifted me a pawn:
Of course, Bg3 was the right move for white, to which I was planning Bc5, with some advantage due to the center and bishop pair. Now I have all of that, plus a healthy extra pawn. My eval is around -1.2.
I got very close. Stockfish says -1.14.
Speaking of pawns, I might have received one from oioki in the black game:
I immediately see a line where d4 should fall, but considering the high caliber of my opponent, I’d like to calculate it thoroughly. The lines look dead simple, so unless I’m missing something basic, I should end up with two pawns to the good:
I did miss something, though not very basic. Nxf3 again would have given me the game. In my lines, I win the pawn, but not the game – the engine keeps the eval very close to 0.00, since the bishop and the white square weaknesses provide ample compensation.
Continued here: https://www.chess.com/blog/romank66/chess-com-2024-2nd-round-e04-first-surprises