Optimissed wrote:
You shouldn't report people for playing better than you expect them to.
I completely agree. I feel bad and sometimes I get tilted. I must say I already feel less tilted just from studying from books properly with a chess board. I wish I'd done it years ago. Having said that, I just got a message from chess.com saying "one or more of my opponents has violated our fair play policy" and my rating points for that/those games were refunded. 😍
I recently started reading the wonderful book "The Art of Attack in Chess" by Vladimir Vukovic. The first chapter discusses attacking an uncastled king along the e-file. It really is excellent and analyses some very interesting games. Since starting it, however, my rating has suffered a little as I try out crazy ideas, but in this game, it all came together. My opponent played the Sicilian and delayed castling. I don't like playing against the Sicilian, so decided to try out a closed system used in the game Potemkin - Alekhine, St. Petersburg, 1912 that Vukovic analyses in Chapter 2 with 2. g3. Since I was castled and my opponent wasn't, it made sense to put a rook on the e-file and try and open it up just like the games discussed in the book. Within a few moves, I even decided to sacrifice a knight to keep the initiative and it paid off for once. The thing is, I analysed the game, and the computer gave me >98% accuracy. In the Sicilian. I was really pleased, but it made me think: what if I was reported for cheating? I've reported lots of people I suspected of using engine assistance, but if my opponent had played like I did, I would be 100% suspicious. Anyway, it's an interesting game and just shows the importance of castling. By the way, the closed system didn't work out too well for Potemkin in the analysed game, and I'll provide a PGN of that below too.
For some reason, the insert game function didn't allow me to continue making annotations after f5 attacking my knight, but basically, I decided to risk playing for the initiative rather than retreating and allowing my opponent time to consolidate. It was a 3+2 game, so you haven't got all the time in the world to calculate, but it just looked to me like if I ignore it and play Nd4 and then my opponent takes, I take back with the bishop and have huge pressure on d6, which ultimately proved to be the case.
Here's the game Potemkin - Alekhine, St. Petersburg 1912, where Alekhine gets a beautiful attack against white's uncastled king.