I can't figure where I went wrong in this game.

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Hello Forum, 

I am a beginner player trying hard to improve and learn. It's been less than a month since I actively started playing Chess. 

I usually am able to analyse my games. particularly losses, on my own. But in this particular game, I can't seem to find the exact point at which I started losing the plot. I had so many pieces waiting to be activated, but the next thing I knew, I was one move away from a Mate. Of course I know that the last 2 moves of mine were outright blunders, however, what i am interested to know from the Senior members here is about the overall Game Strategy. Where did i go wrong in terms of the "Game Flow". What can I learn here to not repeat in my Future Games? 

Like I said, I am very new to the game, So i hope experienced players here are a little Gentle in looking at my game which I am sure would appear Amateurish to them.  

Link to the Game: https://www.chess.com/live/game/3030370130  

 You made a combination of positional errors that added up to a shit position and your tactical trouble really flowed from that.  14. ... nc7 certainly doesn't see the threat, but your already screwed by then -- b5 is a huge problem regardless.  Almost every game between 700 players is decided by blunders, but that isn't really true here.  Here are some issues:

1.  after 3 ... bd7 and 4. ... e6 what is your light square bishop?  Its a big pawn.  Thats bad.  (Chess players call bishops like this "bad bishops")

2.  while 6. ... nb4 wasn't a great idea in the first place, 7 ... c6 is much worse.  If you are going to move a piece twice early you have to get something out of it, such as trading off your Big Pawn bishop (bad bishop) for a good bishop.  Instead, you play c6 burying your Big Pawn even more and giving your knight nowhere to go except a6.  "A knight on the rim is dim" is a beginner saying, because usually a knight on the rim can't do much -- it controls fewer and usually less important squares, and has fewer choices of where to go next.  This stuff all relates to the principle that as you get better, what your pieces are doing or can be doing is hugely important to focus on.  We call this piece activity.  

3.  you have got to focus on developing your pieces.  The queen usually doesn't come out before the pieces are developed because the enemy can gain time attacking her, and its hard to know where she should go early.  8 ... qa5 is a bad move by itself, does nothing there, and leads to you needing to move again on move 10.  Then 12. ... f5 also doesn't develop anything -- it should be no surprise that your opponent had an easy win he missed in be5.  After 13. ne5, your position is certainly awful, but you make it even worse by undeveloping your bishop!!  Look at your position -- your king is open, white is much more developed, it should be no surprise your busted.  

So what am I trying to teach here?  Three concepts -- bad bishops, piece activity and the importance of focusing on development.  Ask if you have any questions.  

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I understand and re-looked at the placement of Bishops in the game and totally get your point. Shall try to improve on that front moving forward.  I do however know about the Queen activity and piece development bit. Just that, I tend to forget them in a few random games every now and then. Consistency in remembering those Fundamentals seems to be the key.  Most often, when I play needlessly defensive, i mess it up. But like I said, it has been less than a month since I started playing, So I hope it only gets better from here. Thank you so much for your invaluable inputs. 

I would really be happy if a few more senior members could pitch in their thoughts on this thread and the Game that I posted above.

More perspectives, the better.  

5...Nxe5! wins a pawn for Black - a trick worth bearing in mind, more often seen in the Advance French, though.

Hello, I really like your attitude towards learning! Playing rapid games and analyzing them afterwards is the surest way to improve your gameplay. For someone who has played this game only for about a month, you seem to be doing pretty well!

For this reason I decided to do a full annotation of your game, to try to help you understand where you went wrong. The root of your issues in this game started with neglecting opening principles and launching a premature attack with your knight and queen on the queenside. It eventually ended up in a situation, where your knight and queen had to retreat, giving white free tempo moves (moves that force you to respond) to advance his queenside pawns. Soon you were in a situation, where you were lacking development, and opponent was just about to steamroll over you with his pawns.

He did, however, give you many chances to come back to the game, but in most cases those were tactical shots that you had to see (or understand the real underlying threats with the piece placement). That is something you will get better at by just playing more, and analyzing your games afterwards. Perhaps doing some tactics training wouldn't hurt either.

Anyways, just couple tips that will prevent you from getting to a situation like this in the opening: Try to get all of your pieces developed! If you are attacking with only two or three pieces, the likelyhood of success is very small. You need all of your forces. And if your attack fails and you have to retreat, your pieces sitting on their starting squares are awful defenders. So get your knights out, bishops playing, castle your king early and only after this think about where to place your queen. As soon as your rooks can see each other, you can consider your development ready, and you can start launching an attack. Of course this is a basic principle, and sometimes you have to make decisions to break the principles (if it wins material or prevents losing material, or stops a mating attack). But generally trying to follow those guidelines will help you get to a better opening, where you can start launching a full scale assault on your opponent.

Anyways, good luck to your future games and here is my annotation!

Nice, we wrote almost the same stuff almost at the same time. :-D

Yeah we did, haha. You were more thorough with your explanation though and addressed some moves that I sort of glossed over.

Yeah there were tactics, but others already mentioned stuff, so I'll limit my comments to your asking about "game flow"

2...Nc6
As others said, this is very awkward already. If I had to take black in that position against a strong player, I wonder if I'd be able to finish development without being in a difficult position.

After white plays e5 the structure will be a french advance structure where black has the benefit of not having played e6 yet (in the french you play e6 on move 1 and block in your light squared bishop). c5 is the thematic pawn break in this structure, so blocking the c pawn is very, again, awkward.

Better was 2...c5 or 2...Bf5 (a move I like to play in this position).

5...f6 is awkward.
Against the e5 d4 structure f6 is a common and correct pawn break, but here you're lacking in development and you can't further pressure the center with pawn to c5. So mostly I see f6 as weakening your king. If you had saved it for 5 or 10 moves later it may have been good though.

Better was just developing with 5...Nge7 (or if you saw the tactic, Nxe5 as others pointed out, but if you don't see any tactics you need to develop).

6...Nb4
Moving a piece twice in the opening is always questionable. It's better to develop your knights and bishops off the back rank as quickly as possible and castle. Better was 6...Nge7.

7...c6
Is uncomfortable, shutting your bishop behind a wall of pawns. You'd much rather play Bxb5 before considering c6.

9...Na6
This move is forced, I just want you to look at this position. White has all 4 minor pieces developed and you have 1 and a half... maybe just 1 (Bd7 and Na6 might only count as a half each).

Ideally you develop your knights and bishops to squares where they influence the center. White's pieces are, but yours aren't. Poor pawn structure and lacking in development of pieces off the back rank. This was the seeds of destruction.

If white plays 10.0-0 and you give this position to two strong players, basically black will never win. Already his position is that difficult. I don't say that to try and shame you, but I'm trying to emphasize that these mistakes are very important even though they probably seem like normal moves to you... which is fine. They're very much common mistakes to make, but by learning how to open a game well, you'll save yourself from these mysteriously bad positions even if you don't really understand why or how the moves are good yet (that will come with time).

https://www.chess.com/article/view/the-principles-of-the-opening

This will come in small spurts.  I mean its the weekend, and a 3 day weekend!  So there is no way i'm spending large amounts of time doing this entire game at once.  
 

Since the advance french structure offers such clear strategic ideas, it's easy to give an example of smooth development choices by black, so here's an example:

 Generally you should always looks to see whether you have a capture or a check that you could play. If you have one, or more, you should look at them to see whether they give you an advantage. Here is a classic example from your game:

You can forget everything about positions and development. If you miss opportunities like this, and your opponent doesn't, you will most likely lose the game.

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Wow! I have seen quite a few videos on Youtube, here on chess dot com and other portals in the last month, But i don't think I ever felt This elated for having found learning potential about a game as in this analysis. Your commentary on every single move is just extraordinarily brilliant from a beginner's (My) perspective. I just can't thank you and Vicariously-I enough for taking the time out in looking at my game in such astute detail.  I may never have looked at my games this way if not for the invaluable stream-of-thoughts you guys shared out here. I'm honestly grateful beyond words. 

While there are a lot of thoughts in my mind right now, one particular aspect that struck me was about your reading of Nxe5 move. I have never looked at Pawns that way. I mean, I feel that the minor/major pieces being in open and active positions is always more important than defending Pawns all the time. So, with that approach, i often ignore being a couple pawns down if it results in active piece development elsewhere on the board. 

My takeaway from your Inputs is that every single pawn holds a lot of value and commands defense or exchanges like any other piece. Tactics should be used if you can be one-up in pawns against your opponent. 

I think this lesson alone will significantly change the way I look at games. 

In fact, I went back and checked the number of pawns I lose compared to those I win for some 15-20 odd matches I played here earlier (Regardless of whether I won the match or lost). The stat I found was that I was down in my number of Pawns lost in almost 80% of those matches. That clearly explains the flaw. 

Again, Thank you guys for your kind gestures. Sincerely appreciate it.  

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Yes indeed. The major takeaways for me in the game that ultimately led to terrible positions were my ignorance of the tactic at Nxe5 in the opening, Placing the Queen at a5 (In hindsight, This move was basically a result of finding a lot of success with Q + N and/or Q +B combinations attacking the King side after my opponents had castled in previous games. I'm glad I came across a better player who taught me exactly how it can backfire). I still don't understand what made me not realize the lack of development on King's side. Taking Pawn with my King side knight on F6 was a no-brainer on the 11'th move. But I let the Pressure created on Queen side influence my decisions for the worse.  Also, I was way too passive in defense where I should have attacked and exchanged in the middlegame.  Exchanging my weak Bishop for instance. A fatal error at the very end was not taking Nxe5 on move 25. 

I have learned a lot in this last one odd day. You guys are all awesome.  

Winning a pawn with the Nxe5 tactic is nice but missing it is not what caused your downfall this game. What you need to work on is developing your pieces efficiently to active squares and getting your King castled early. If you work on that then I think you can reach 1000 before too long. These videos should help you:

Chess Fundamentals - John Bartholomew 

Beginner to Chess Master - Chessnetwork

Watch the Chess Fundamentals playlist first. Video 3 titled "Typical Mistakes" will be especially relevant because he goes over a lot of the mistakes that you made in your game. I guarantee that you will improve after watching these videos.

I'm going to venture to guess that you watched videos on the French defense where you watched a GM kill someone using the f6 idea?  In this game when you played f6 as mentioned it wasn't the most well-timed thing to do, plus, capturing with the pawn was bad in your game because it was more important to develop a piece since you were way behind on development.  Never follow an opening blindly.  Constantly apply opening principles.  Principles like piece activity.  Are you pieces as active as they can be.  Are your pieces developed?  Are you ahead or behind in development.  Also learn to know when to strike at the center.  You probably do this right in other games but sometimes that's just not what you are supposed to do and you should be constantly looking for reasons to do or not do certain things, including doing a pawn break, and trying to decide if it is necessary or not.  Always look for forcing Moves, checks, captures, and threats.  If I remember correctly you missed a tactical shot by blindly striking at the center with your f6 idea you saw in a previous video or something...  I know you are supposed to try new ideas out, like the f6 idea, but at the same time, you are supposed to calculate the variables that are in your own game, seeing if those same ideas are good in your own game, because sometimes they are not, like in this instance.  Never make a thoughtless move in chess.  

Also when you play a move like f6 it leaves behind weaknesses that might be exploited later on by your opponent.  You should always consider if your moves create weaknesses that can be exploited in the game.  I can recall a game where my opponent played f6 and I later won either a whole piece or a pawn simply because I had a forcing move, a check, that while giving this check, allowed me to grab material.  See when you play f6 it opens up your king to a check, and you have to be prepared to gauge whether it's possible for your opponent to make something out of this threat, or just play prophylactic, and move your king out of the way, but that move in and of itself wastes time, and quite possibly should be checked before possibly making an unnecessary king move, but 9 times out of ten, it is always a good idea whenever you can, to do moves like this, but, in your situation, you would not have had enough time to do it, because you where simply lagging way behind on development.

Don't move the same piece twice in the opening unless it creates some kind of threat or you have to because it is being attacked.

Don't develop a piece when where it can easily be attacked.  This is called unstable development.

It's stuff like this that you have to learn.  General opening principles.  You can learn stuff like this watching john bartholomew videos on climbing the rating ladder.  Just google climbing the rating latter and watch the videos around your rating level and a step or two higher.  The Prodigy program now offers free instruction geared toward beginners that you should watch if you don't even have a diamond membership here on chess.com and can't watch the videos here.  https://www.chessvl.com/

Just go to that link and you should be able to find 4 hours of video instruction by the most popular online chess coach on chess.com

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Thank you. Guess you didn't notice that Preggo_Basashi has already given his invaluable inputs in the thread earlier.

The analysis from other senior members and the external links provided by Vicariously-I are enough to keep me busy learning for the next many days. 

I wish I could incorporate all of what I have gathered in this thread at once in my Games now. But I do realize that won't happen. It will take time. I am still going to make mistakes already being corrected in this thread but what matters is that I notice them, make a note, practice and learn until the time I don't repeat them at all.