You Cant Miss This !
“The great thing about chess is it’s a game for oneself. You don’t work on what you can’t control, you just work on yourself. And I think if more people did that, we’d all be a lot better off.”
-Daniel Naroditsky
It is easy to grow at chess once you understand how to analyze and how correct your system. Similarly, in my journey, there have been many matches with many great players. I have been in contact with most of them now. Today I was about to write a blog on the world chess championship match between GM Ding Liren and GM Ian Nepomniachtchi. Recently I polled on my Instagram which said to post on my matches first. So for my friends, this blog is for you hope you love it.
To start I have included matches that would be of educational purpose some of them showcase theory some show tactical approach and some shows advanced chess concept like piece mobility restriction.
Boas domination-
These games are always close to my heart since they show complete domination. Here I constrict the opponent like boas till the end and then smothered mate them. How many of us have got smothered mates? and how many of them? I am happy that I have more than 3 and most importantly, I found this pattern is the best feeling.
smothered mate-
In chess, a smothered mate is a checkmate delivered by a knight in which the mated king is unable to move because it is surrounded (or smothered) by its pieces.
Importance of castling -
Here my opponent played Caro kann against me. Now you know it's my repertoire so I played Fantasy Variation which is the most critical test of Caro kann. For someone who wants to learn. The idea is to hold the center pawn. If it is attacked by a knight, then form a chain. This restricts blacks' mobility and you can go for a king-side attack.
Here biggest mistake my opponent did was he did not castle. My moves from 16 move onward are just pushing black pieces backward.
Calculation Errors-
Blunder Oh man !!!
Blunder is very common in the Blitz game. Sometimes you see the idea of some line but one move is wrong in the calculation. It happened to me in this game. I thought I was Paul morphy, Who is smothered mating his opponent. When the review came it was a great slap showing me my one-move blunder. Now since the opponent was under so much pressure from being attacked for a long time he didn't see that and got smothered and mated himself. So key thing to take from this match is to calculate your line thoroughly.
Accessing squares-
position over the attack-
I love this game because it shows early queen attacks are risky for us. My opponent here, bought his/her queen early to attack the queen's side. Queen's gambit was my repertoire for almost a year, and from my knowledge in Baltic Defense queen should not bother around a4 since its light square escape is blocked by the bishop on f5.
Here is how I trapped his queen by gaining square.
Here is what the image in my mind looked like while playing moves.
After things as before this match, I said king safety is the top priority I castled.
Here queen is trapped and I only need to attack her with my knight; this is how I will win the queen. The same happened as per my plan and being queen up I am capable enough to convert the game.
Get them out of theory-
This is the best part because I would get a chance to appreciate a fellow chess player. Today I met a guy named kevindodcom we played almost 7 matches and bonded a lot. Now, why did I choose specifically this person is, This guy made me lose my accuracy. How? well, he was well aware of my theories and, he played critical lines. I just dropped my accuracy since I was not playing the most common main lines. I lost starting match to him because of a blunder but he was not arrogant one to not rematch me. This kind of person is the real reason people will love chess even more. So let's see how my friend played against me.
I will cover some critical games here and discuss the main points.
As you can see, This guy played cutting-edge mainline theory as a white so, you know how good he is. But wait why is he under this topic is it due to the following reason or following matches? This was just to give you a brief why I can't play the main line against him.
Now for people to not get confused about why it is a draw it is because we don't care about rating when people who genuinely love chess meet like this they will draw it since they know what the result was.
Here is the most exciting match you should see.
You will realize I played 'Queens Gambit' after a year because in our conversation he said he plays vienna and Caro kann. So he might know Ponziani. Also if he is a vienna player he might have an idea of King's gambit.
This is the reason why I played d4 instead of e4.
NOTE- I didn't play it in regular order but mixed it as per my potential so stockfish analysis might show inaccuracies but you have to make some moves to confuse the opponent.
Nd5 is a flashy move and it was the most critical move since his queen would hang. Also, he loses his center pawn for which I had connected two Pawns. Well, the game went easy since he blunder the trade in the next moves which made me up a piece.
Now, this is a double fianchetto system. I saw this in the Chessbrah stream titled "Fianchetto only". I have a general idea of what I should play here. This is the reason why I was at a 30-sec advantage after 11 moves.
chess.com rates me as 1900 and him to be 1600 in review whereas I was losing most of the time. If it was a rapid game, my 1650s opponent would easily get these mistakes but for Blitz, it's a little tough since it's not the most common system. Personally, I played in like 1400-1500 range since the only turning point of the game was he hanged his knight.
Here I was against a fantasy variation. As I said fantasy is the critical testing line for the Caro kann player. So what did I do? I have updated what GM does when they play caro kann. Recently GM Magnus Carlsen and GM Hikaru Nakamura played the Caro line in a chessable tournament where early queen trade happens. That was the same idea I used here. Before today I never have used this line.
As promised my friend I have considered our matches in my blog hope you love it. Also this all thought was from my perspective maybe he had different ideas so it's just my views and I don't mean to hurt any sentiment of my friends in any way.
Never Resign-
Well never resigning is always a great suggestion in chess. Since Endgame requires higher precision with long-term understanding. In blitz, you don't have time to calculate this and maybe you blunder a piece. To blunder a queen or rook is a different aspect but if you have connected a passed pawn then you have still scope.
NOTE- I am not telling you to not quit because mouse slip can happen but during OTB matches you should not miss things like this.
Here is a match where I showed this,
Here I learned this endgame from the analysis let's see if you can understand this,
NOTE- I would not fake that I knew this was the line. My only intention was to promote the pawn. This study is after a review of the game.
Why is knight sacrifice here a brilliant move?
The reason behind this is that the end game is the most probable draw according to the engine since both of them will get queen with no other pieces on board.
Here is that line,
Now we both are not engines neither did he know the line or else it would be drawn.
So, what happened instead of that which made me win?
You can see here that the position is equal as shown in the evaluation bar.
What happened to evaluation why did it suddenly favor me?
The reason is very simple my passed pawn to strong now and not one I will have two of them. Here is how it will be,
This was Rustam1409 and he is also a strong player I hope he will love this end-game part which is so intriguing.
Be calm in the long game-
This is my match against my INDIAN new friend Gegason or Anand Shukla as his name suggests on chess.com. Some players won't give you chance and play a long-lasting game. It mostly saw people get frustrated after not getting winning moves before they were expecting. Anand here played a very tough match our position was equal throughout the game. The only winning idea ever I got was after my queen infiltration was possible at C2.
What did one rook move just a little slide change?
The answer to that is simply my queen wanted to infiltrate there earlier and c2 was hanging but then his queen was also on e5 and if I would have been greedy in taking that pawn I would either lose my queen or gotten mated by Rb7 check so when his queen moved only problem was just a rook to be moved and once his rook moved that was my only gateway to victory doors which came after 34 moves.
So you have to respect the way your opponent is playing and be calm. chess has the interesting fact that,
"It's not the first blunder or mistake that counts, It's the last one that counts."
so I hope you will love this match.
To conclude this blog, I would first appreciate that this guy took the initiative and allowed me to discuss our match in my blogs. It was easy for me to upload my 80-90% accuracy matches which were either opponent blundering in opening or hanging pieces. Most of them came from Anti Sicilian, "The Alapin Sicilian" People really don't know at 1200-1600 how to face it. So against Sicilians, it would be a great repertoire. This match above shows that I am 1700 rapid and around 1550 in blitz stills blunders when I face offbeat moves.
So these were some of my recent matches and tommorow onwards there will be series of all 14 days,
CHESS WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP BETWEEN
GM Ding Liren AND GM Ian Nepomniachtchi
