“Life is a kind of Chess, with struggle, competition, good and ill events”
— Benjamin Franklin

Well, after 312 lichess tournaments, your Hive account@lighteye experienced a winning one — 313! This incerdible event has happened at the HIVE Olympia Arena Chess Tournament organized by our Hive account@schamangerbert (HerbyW at lichess).

You can interpret this as an announcement of a certain end of the world, but your Hive account@lighteye would rather like you think: “Wait a minute, if he could do such a feat, so can I!” And then boldly join the competitions organized by Hive account@schamangerbert (Blitz Chess) and Hive account@stayoutoftherz (Hivechess). And you can make your own tournament and collect the votes of chess fanatics from Hive.

In this tournament, the average ELO rating of the seven participants was 1762. It would probably be appropriate to show one of the games from the tournament, but alas… the blitz games are mostly made of errors, so it would not make sense to present gross mistakes. In both defeats, I lost blundering (one extremely rough blunder), and on this occasion I can thank all my opponents who made oversights against me and enabled me to finally triumph. Therefore, on this occasion, I will present a game from a few days ago in which there also were mistakes, but at least it has an educational quality. As always, if my opponent loses the game, he will remain anonymous:

This will be a story of a back rank blunder… without Rooks on the board. Yes, it’s possible even without Rooks, and you should be aware of it if you want to improve your game.

This is called ‘Zukertort Opening: Sicilian Invitation’ probably because good old Johannes Hermann Zukertort (actually he was a Polish Jan Hermann Cukiertort) tried to translate this opening onto a Sicilian one.

White refused in an effort to avoid the well-known theoretical sequels and probably to keep control over the long diagonal with his light square Bishop.

After the initial maneuvers in attempts to capture the center and the open d-file, your Hive account@lighteye is the first to make a big blunder. It was far too early to jump at d5, because now white has ♘g5 with a direct checkmate threat and a permanent initiative at least.

Fortunately, my opponent accepts the exchange and relief in the center, probably expecting dominance along the light square diagonal. Now your Hive account@lighteye offers an exchange of the strongest piece and move into an even ending with half a minute more at the clock.

Now White makes a blunder in the time crisis. He is obviously fixed to that long diagonal and a plan to snatch one of black pieces on it. He obviously does not have the time to consider alternative plan or to think of defense. Your Hive account@lighteye unfortunately mises a chance to take that gifted White Knight with a simple e5!

Finally, everything is ready for taking the piece and mastering the diagonal. Unfortunately for White, he forgets the back rank. From this moment on, everything is forced…

No more Rooks, but still, weakness of the back rank decides the game. As always, the trick in a blitz game is to make the penultimate mistake…

Thank you all for your attention and see you at the next tournament!