We unfortunately lost our Vote Chess match against Team Asia. Following a suggestion by Stephen33 I have run the game through a chess engine (Rybka) to try to see where we went wrong. I haven't done much in the way of annotations. I'll leave that to anybody who knows what they are doing.

Overview. Playing black we were very slightly down after the opening but for 3 moves in succession (between moves 13 and 15) they failed to find one of the 4 best moves (according to Rybka) and we managed to equalise and then get our noses in front. But we failed to capitalise at move 15 and we were back level. From this point until the end of the game they found the best move every time and we didn't. It seems we lost the game at move 19, when we failed to play 19... g5 to keep us in the game. Every other move (according to Rybka) was losing. For this move I let Rybka go to depth 16, so I imagine it is not far from the truth. From that point on they played faultlessly and we resigned at move 26.

If anybody, whether or not they played on the JSST team, would like to comment, please do so. If you would like me to feed in some other moves into the analysis, or let the engine search deeper, I am happy to do that. I haven't been back through the archive to see whether in our discussions we actually rejected moves that could have won the game.

[J.S.S.T.]

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