I groan when my opponents play 4. Ng5 in the two knights. And here I made a terrible rookie mistake just without thinking. Luckily my opponent didn't find the right way to punish my mistake, and blundered right back, and then got his/her queen int...
I was so unhappy with the way in which I lost this game that I decided to do a post-mortem and see where I went wrong (hence 'self-flagellation'). I missed all sorts of stuff, mainly due to a kind of blindness in my calculations - either not seein...
I missed the quickest route to mate in this 2|1 game, but can you find it? If there was a theme, it would have to be "square vacation".
In this game, my opponent played a weird opening, which turns out to be called the Jalalabad Defence. It's a bad looking opening, but my mistakes turned out to be worse than however objectively bad the defence is. This game was 15 minutes with a t...
My opponent gets confused about the move order in the French, opening up some crushing tactics on the castled king. I enjoyed finding the winning sequence here.
An epic in which I commit several positional errors early on, saddling myself with weak isolated pawns while my opponent centralises a pair of powerful knights and leaves his dark squared bishop menacingly on the long diagonal, which then breaks d...
I just lost this rook ending (time control was 15|10) in an intensely frustrating manner. I went for the rook ending at around move 27. I was two pawns up and had a passed pawn on the a-file, and surely at worst I should have come away with a draw...
My 2014 in Chessrospective 2014 was the year I started taking chess 'seriously'. By which I mean, I started putting effort into improving my game. I'm one of those adults who learned how to play as a kid, but never played competitively, and befor...
It's always nice to pry open files and checkmate a castled king. If you solve the puzzle, you'll get the whole game plus my analysis, and see how black gets into dire straits by a combination of (1) pointlessly attacking my pieces when there is no...
I was up a piece in this Ruy Lopez, but we all know the importance of finding the right idea to win a won game. My opponent blundered badly, but I was very pleased with the clear plan that I found from move 32 onwards revolving around Re8, and the...
Just wondered what anyone thought about my decision to exchange sac my queen in this game at move 33 in the below. I was already a piece up, and so by the exchange I would have a bishop, knight and rook for my queen, which is pretty nice compensat...
Another post prompted by frustration at having thrown away a win through poor technique. I built up a positional advantage, which I thought I could convert, and was even helped by a blunder by my opponent. But then I guess I got complacent - I blu...
In this game I set a nice little trap to win my opponent's queen. It all went according to plan, and I won the game, but post-game analysis threw up a very unexpected line which showed my trap wasn't what it appeared. I'd be interested to hear fr...
I wish the title of this blog referred to my plans to frustrate my opponents. Instead, it is about my frustration at my inability to plan in positions I find unclear. My opponent generally likes an early bishop fianchetto on b2, and makes no att...
I think this is one of the most successfully positional games I have played, where the win mostly resulted from taking advantage of the imbalances in the position, rather than simple tactical errors, which I think is a sign of improvement in my pl...
Instructive lessons from this game: (1) when playing turn-based chess, don't forget your plan in between moves just because you didn't look at the game for a day or two (2) when you do end up making a mistake, don't make rash decisions immediately...
A Najdorf Sicilian which brought home to me how careful you have to be in these highly theoretical lines. My opponent goes for an aggressive king-side pawn storm, but completely underestimates the strength of the queenside counterplay I have avail...
A game in four parts. Part 1: I establish a crushing advantage. Part 2: I blunder badly and let white back in the game. Part 3: my stupidity only increases, giving white a real advantage. Part 4: white miscalculates and I trade down to a won endga...
A series of puzzles based on tactics which cropped up in some of my games recently. Enjoy! First, a quick and painful mate which was delivered in 15 moves. We join the game at move 12: Next, getting ready to throw a rook boomerang: ...
Here I made a silly early mistake, playing 5. ...a6 for the Najdorf, and then immediately 6. ...g6, which makes no sense. It gets me into hot water early on, but white is unable to capitalise, and slowly but surely I eke out an advantage, winning ...
Here I'm taking a look at some of the reasons why I end up losing games. The first instalment is, to the surprise of nobody, tactics. In most of these positions there are of course all sorts of positional things to pay attention to, and in some of...
Here I was winning, nay crushing, an opponent rated several hundred rating points above me, having (bizarrely) won his queen early on in the game through a series of unimpeded knight moves, four in a row. It didn't last. The white knight ensconce...
Another example of a successful pursuit of a castled king in a Sicilian defence with the Yugoslav-style attacking set up. For previous instalments, see here for a failure, and here for a success. The black Queen goes on an early excursion, but, in...
This game taught me a few things. First, how creating weak squares with early pawn pushes can come back to haunt you. Second, that when things are getting very bad, perhaps a piece sacrifice is the best way out. I was clearly lost from quite early...
A case study in how to try to be clever and thereby throw away a win. Observe:
