Game Review #10 | Bird's Opening: a closed positional game!
#BirdsOpening
Welcome to another episode of the "chess noob Game Review" series where the focus will be on identifying in how a game, whether I win or lose, could have been improved. This gives me an opportunity to reflect more deeply about a game and hopefully, the lessons that I draw for myself will be helpful to my fellow beginner and beginner-intermediate chess players!
This was a complicated game with 83 moves with twists and turns! I had the Black pieces and White surprised me from the first move (1. f4) - Bird's Opening! This is an uncommon opening, occurring in 0.2% of master games, and about 1% of lower-rated online games. It is objectively not very good (Stockfish 15.1 gives it an evaluation of [-0.4]) but it absolutely has the element of surprise. According to Eric Schiller's book, "Unorthodox Chess Openings", there are several gambits that can come out of this opening as well.
In the opening, I simply played using general opening principles, and this worked well, taking an early advantage to around [-2]. I managed to gain some space advantage, and won a bit of tempo chasing White's bishop and then later, their queen.
However, the middle game was of a rather closed position. All the knights were off the board, and we each still had 8 pawns each! This made for a complicated positional game. I maintained my advantage for most of the middle game, but I can't say it ever felt like I was winning. Both my opponent and I made mistakes on later Stockfish analysis, but the "best" moves were often obscure and difficult to understand.
Later in the middle game, we both trade off our bishops, so it became a dance of rooks and pawns. And despite me having an advantage of [-5] in the middlegame, we entered an endgame each with a rook and four pawns dead drawn [0.00]. Luckily for me, I ended up with an easier to play position and I was convinced that I had a forced win on move 68. My opponent must have thought so too and so it really was a self-fulfilling prophecy. I was astounded to discover on analysis that this was position was still drawn!
Can you see how White can still draw this game? (This is covered in the video and comments in the PGN.)
After we traded rooks and my pawn promoted to queen, it was near the end. I did have to work out how to move my queen to prevent White's last pawn from promoting, but once I worked out the pattern, the game was over. GG!
