Alekhine's Defense, Scandinavian | INTERESTING game against Indian beginner!
#alekhine #scandinavian #india #indiachess
I played this game a few days ago against a rather lower-rated opponent. Something funny has been going on with chess.com recently. Sometimes when I choose a new game, it takes quite a while to match a 15+10 game of rapid, and recently, I've matched players much lower rated than myself. With new Indian friend is around 600 ELO points lower!
However, I thought that they played really well for a 700s-ELO rated player. One of the interesting observations I've had against Indian opponents, though it might just be a statistical fluke, is that they seem to play interesting openings and are often stronger than what you might expect at their rating level!
My opponent led with the Alekhine's Defense, Scandinavian Variation (1. e4 Nf6 2. Nc3 d5). This is a completely okay opening for Black, and I know no theory. This always makes things immediately interesting, and it allows me an opportunity to really play according to principles, tactics, and strategy!
I push my e-pawn to attack Black's knight. In a fascinating symmetric move, Black pushes their d-pawn to counterattack my knight on c3. We mutually capture symmetrically. Stockfish's recommendation is to keep capturing with the pawns, but here, I chickened out and decided to capture (5. bxc3) instead, seeing an opportunity to build a strong centre with pawns. This was suboptimal [0.00] but that required Black to play accurately. They couldn't continue to play symmetrically as I could now play (6. d4) taking the centre with the privilege that White gets to move first!
Black continued to play aggressively and provocatively with (6... e5), immediately contesting the centre. My intuition was that this wasn't a good move for them, and this was the case [+0.8], but I couldn't help but admire the move.
On move 8, I saw a couple of different tactics, but decided to go for a sneaky one where I could potentially win Black's queen. This involves a deflection of Black's king, and this is covered in the video presentation. However, Black didn't "bite" and opted to move their queen, and then their bishop to the queenside. I was sure that this was a mistake on their part as the attack was going to be down the centre or on the kingside. Moving their active pieces to the opposite side was a tactical mistake. Stockfish agreed, giving progressive worse evaluations for Black as the game progressed.
However, I was impressed that Black clearly was trying to set up tactical threats, even if they didn't work. It's impressive as many players at this level will play reactive chess, or tactics that don't go beyond a projection of a single move.
On move 14, I manage to infiltrate down the centre with my queen with the newly fully open d-file (14. Qxd5). With Black's king still in the centre, my queen now smashes Black's queenside by capturing material after material. On move 17, Black attempted to trade queens, but in doing so, hung mate-in-one down the centre. GG!
The big takeaway from this game is that you can't just launch attack after attack in the opening with no regard for king safety. Eventually in the middlegame when the attack fizzles out, your king is stuck in the centre and in trouble!
Game on chess.com: https://www.chess.com/game/live/88066746817
