Mostly interested in hearing thoughts on the first 20 moves or so. As noted in the annotations, once a game is lost I like to play it out rather than resign, but at blitz speed without much thought.
A decisive loss
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Thanks for the comment! I did think really hard about 11. e6. I think I took almost 5 minutes on that one, trying to find a way to justify it, but it felt too speculative. Next time I'll try it.
It feels like you steadily lose energy throughout the game as your opponent squeezes you on the Queenside -- I think your annotations are interesting, but mistaken... I don't think you have "decent piece activity" beginning move 13. You have a bunch of dodgy pieces. You had lots to do! You needed to improve that N on a2, you needed needed to place your Rooks effectively (not passively or 'wishfully' (14.Re1?!) -- you need to perhaps exchange that crippling N of his on d5... attack his weaknesses... I prefer 16.Qe2 to Qe4... or even perhaps 16.Qc4 ... What you needed was space and piece activity and you had little of either. Counter-attacking on the kingside was certainly the right kind of idea (counterattacking somewhere...counterplay) but your moves (h4) weren't vigorous or forcing enough. You might have offered your bishop at h6 and sac'd on g7 if he declined -- desperate and panicky but your situation was grim. The strategy of handing him rope and hoping he'd hang himself will work against weak players but against stronger players they take the rope and tie you up... that's what happened here. You kept 'offering' him the opportunity to make bad exchanges and hurt himself... and he kept declining and improving his postion. You should have been doing the same.
Look over the games of Em. Lasker and Pillsbury, players of that era, watch how they constantly fight for initiative. Perhaps study up on basic positional chess... which IMO at least is learning ways of acting on the perogative: make your pieces as good as possible make his pieces bad as possible.
"The strategy of handing him rope and hoping he'd hang himself will work against weak players but against stronger players they take the rope and tie you up... that's what happened here. You kept 'offering' him the opportunity to make bad exchanges and hurt himself... and he kept declining and improving his postion. You should have been doing the same."
This is a fantastic way of putting it. I don't think I'm quite ready to make the leap to my opps' playing strength and play positionally like that, but I feel like it's getting close enough that I can begin to see where I might get there.
Let me ask this. I essentially gave up on the game after losing the night, but after 29. ... Rc8, I wonder if I wouldn't have had a chance with Ne5 and trying to protect the passed pawn.
KyleJRM wrote:
"The strategy of handing him rope and hoping he'd hang himself will work against weak players but against stronger players they take the rope and tie you up... that's what happened here. You kept 'offering' him the opportunity to make bad exchanges and hurt himself... and he kept declining and improving his postion. You should have been doing the same."
This is a fantastic way of putting it. I don't think I'm quite ready to make the leap to my opps' playing strength and play positionally like that, but I feel like it's getting close enough that I can begin to see where I might get there.
Of course you're ready. There isn't some giant leap between playing positionally and not playing positionally... it's exactly like tactics, you work with what you've got and try to get better and hopefully do get better with time and practice.
All those exchanges you offered with the hope that he'd take, that already is positional chess -- you clearly had positional goals and were using positional thinking so don't say you aren't ready because you're already doing it -- you simply want to learn more effective ways of realizing your ideas... (and expand your palette of ideas.)