The Awesome Knight
This is a very interesting game I played on this site, with 9 consecutive knight moves!
To blitz or not to blitz?
This is a question that has been circling my mind for a while. I have heard some people say that playing blitz creates bad habits of not calculating enough, and playing more by "instinct". I have also heard people say, and I agree, that what's m...
Spanish to the end
This is a blitz game I played today, featuring my favorite opening as white, and the opening I have been actively studying for the last few months. It was a very enjoyable game for me, because as I played I could see many of the concepts, themes ...
Stubbornness
Here is another of my games, where I planned to use the Dragon as black. My opponent did not follow main lines, yet somehow we reached a Sicilian position. The position was clearly a Najdorf, but since I don't know much about it, I decided to cont...
Playing it by ear
Following an emerging theme on my games, and also inspired by a very interesting thread in the Chess.com forums about studying openings, I present another game of mine. In this game, I was out of my mental book by move 2 and this was truly a firs...
Been proved wrong
This post presents another game I played recently, but now it will have a little background story. In a recent post, I questioned the usefulness of spending time learning opening lines at my level, where most of my opponents don't follow mainline...
The Revenge of the Black Queen
This is another commented game of mine, I just thought I could make a better title than just adding up to the chapter counter. This blitz game was played online with a 10 minute clock, and though it is full of positional and tactical errors, it w...
What was I thinking? ch.5
Continuing with my comments on some of the games I play, this post has another game with a 15 minute clock played online. This game brings me to wonder if dedicating time to studying main opening lines is really useful at my level. Practically no...
What was I thinking? ch. 4
Here is another of my games, played online with a 15 minute clock. I particularly enjoyed this game, because despite I have pretty much no knowledge on white's opening, I managed to use some concepts from other openings I have reviewed to handle ...
What was I thinking? ch. 3
Here is a recent game I played, again with a 15 minute clock. The position seemed clear to me, I could see what my opponent's intentions were and acted accordingly. Unfortunately, I found myself without enough time to reach an endgame, and I cou...
What was I thinking? ch. 2
Here's my next game, with my notes on what I was thinking at the moment of playing the moves. On move 18, my comment refers to the definition of "endgame" as given by Kurt Godden on his most amusing "The Devil's Dictionary of Chess" (http://blog....
What was I thinking? ch. 1
I have decided to annotate my games and post them here, I think that sitting down and reviewing the game, and remembering what was going through my head when I made the move will help me correct my bad chess habits. I usually run Crafty through ...
Collecting Chess sets?
I just realized that I sort of have a collection of chess sets. I have never consciously tried to collect them, but now I have five chess sets. Seems like a lot to me, especially when only my father and me play chess in the family and none of my ...
"I am a positional player"
That's what I would answer when asked how do I like playing my chess games. I just returned to playing chess after I stopped in frustration about six or seven months ago. I hit a plateau, I couldn't beat players with higher rating than me, so I d...
Ruy Lopez, Schliemann variation?
3...f5 This response to the Ruy Lopez was completely new to me, and I looked it up on my database, where I have 10,000+ games. I only found one game among the grandmasters' games, which follows. Why do you think this variation is not pop...
New Sicilian (for me, at least)
I just played this game, I had the black pieces. White came up with a move I've never seen, and I could not find a proper response. All comments are welcome!
Another sicilian game
This is another Sicilian game I played. I've annotated my thoughts during the game, and also some of the ideas I had upon reviewing the game. Any comments are welcome :) In this game, the white king goes down "como torero", as we say...
Closed sicilian. Comments?
I played this game recently, my opponent moved into a line of the Closed sicilian and my position eventually fell apart. I would like some comments on it, since the only move I see as a viable line for black is 3... Ne5. Thanks
