As a 1550 rated online rapid player, I have no doubt very much more to learn about my games than to share. But this game is one I think I played fairly accurately(98.8 to my opponents fairly good 83). Through a combination of luck and intuition, I was able to spot a winning idea here, and remarkably this position is actually a mate in 11(although it takes stockfish depth 30 to find it). After bxf6, the best continuation for black involves playing e2 and prolonging his fate through rook checks, and obviously such a move is equivalent to resignation. Instead, he played the much more practically resilient qh7!? which threatens the rook on f5 and defends the crucial 7th rank. Although this was a 10|0 game, I was ahead on the clock by a couple minutes and sank into very deep thought. The position was completely winning, of that much I was sure of, but the pawn and rook on the e file appear to be a legitimate threat. Could I have simplified into an easily winning position? Yes. But I was determined to convert the game as quickly as possible. So after considering how the queen was performing 2 crucial tasks: attacking an undefended and potentially poorly placed rook, and defending the 7th rank from any mating ideas with my bishop and queen, I found a move which overloaded the queens defenses. By now, you have probably already considered it, yep, rd7!!!. This is the only move in the position which leads to a forced mate, and by far the most aesthetically appealing. Both the rooks are now en prise, and the amazing thing is that you can't take either of them! In fact, real game came to an abrupt end when my opponent played qxf5? to which I calmly replied qf7#. But the real beauty was in the analysis, which reveals the fact that every other continuation results in mate within 7 moves! The most obvious continuation, qxd7?! taking the rook I just offered and staying on the important 7th rank, was really the only line I actually calculated when playing the game. The idea is that after this move, I actually have a mate in 4 moves which I found to be very attractive:
In fact, you can even play be7+! instead of bg7! and the end result is the exact same, with an even more incredible position since now you aren't down the exchange, but a whole rook yet the mate is inevitable.
I had played rd7 under the assumption that at the very worst he would have to give up his queen and would be able to stave off the mate, but it turns out that the longest you can last after qxd7 is 4 moves! Now what was the most resilient defense then? Well, it was actually e2!? giving up the queen but getting in some meaningless rook checks to prolong the mate. In fact, the line is almost identical to what the engine suggested instead of qh7. The fact that a mate in 11 moves can exist in a position with so much material left on the board is dumbfounding to me, and the fact that I was blessed enough to play such a move as rd7 and win still brings a warmth in my heart.
