Hello and Welcome to my blog.
I played a lot of chess during the pandemic and I loved playing it, was addicted to it so bad that I played thousands of online games both on Lichess.org and Chess.com, I would play with a few friends too and got even better than a friend who inspired me to play it in the first place.
Everything was going great until the lockdown restrictions were off and the pandemic gradually started to go away. I slowly lost my interest but my love for the game never went away. It is the most brilliant strategy board game for me and can be beautiful yet so brutal at the same time. You could be playing the best moves from the last 50 moves but one blunder can just make the game slip away.
I love to watch some chess games played by the top grandmaster which impresses me a lot. I wanted to get back to improving chess little by little so I started this chess series on Hive where I share some of the games I play from time to time and analyse some positions from my games too!
Let me share some of the recent games that I played online but before that let's talk about my favourite section, Position of the Day!
Position of the Day
The following position is from one of the games that I played yesterday. White is much better developed and has more centre control with its 'd' pawn restricting the movement of his knight. All of White's pieces are developed and ready to attack. Black played their Queen to d6 trying to attack and scare away White's knight. But can you see a way to take advantage of this move?
I hope you found a way to win material if not continue reading.
Black's back rank is weak. Black's f6 knight is overloaded by the task of saving and protecting their bishop and rook at the same time and we must take advantage of this.
White's knight can take the bishop and Black cannot simply recapture with knight because of Rxe8#. So, black can start by capturing White's rook (Rxe1) but now the White's knight at g4 can take on the Black Knight with check (Nf6+) and later capture the Rook. No matter how black responds White is going to be at least winning a piece if not hanging a mate in 1 like they did in my case...lol
Black resigned a split second after they captured my Knight and hanging mate in 1. Why do players realise their mistakes 0.0001 seconds after playing the move!? It happens to me all the time...lol
A Risky Attack!
I was White in the next game where I got a significant advantage out of the opening but messed it up by missing a simple discovered check. I did not give up as I knew I could attack with white in that position.
This was one of the most impressive games that I think I played in some time. I kept pushing my h pawn and attacked their castled king while I delayed my castling just to make use of the open h file.
I even gave up my other rook for bishop which felt more valuable in that position. So, it was not really a blunder but a calculated sacrifice. In the later part of the game, I calculated nicely and checkmated Black. I missed a simple mate in 1 at some point but calculated the other move which was winning for me. All these calculations in a 3+0 blitz game felt great. This was the game where I crossed 1700 and it felt great.
I was feeling so much better after this game that I played more games and won most of them. Let me show you another quick checkmate with Black!
Punishing early Queen move
Even after crossing 1700 players still play the early Bishop and Queen attack hoping for a checkmate...lol
I know how to punish those gamblers and I did precisely that with Black in this next game.
Queen is one of the most powerful pieces in the game and if attacked by other pieces you have to pay attention to it. Moving out your Queen early in the game can backfire so quickly, your opponent can gain a lot of tempo and develop quickly by just attacking your Queen all around the board.
If you see the above game carefully, White had to move the Queen three times even before developing their second Knight and you can't expect to get a good position by moving the same pieces again and again in the early game. It gets punished and rightly so.
That was one of the easiest wins I had and I didn't calculate much during the game too just played the position and I knew I was better at all times.
I had a great run yesterday, played 29 Blitz games in a sitting and gained a whooping 47 rating points. I lost a few and some losses were on time as I play the 3+0 blitz. But I am getting much better in time management, without the increment you start to get much faster even in your opening and try to leave the maximum amount of time for those critical positions at the middle or end game.
Not only on lichess.org I played some chess games on Discord with a friend too and performed well in those too. So, I feel like I am improving both in my tactical and positional play. But the destination is still too far, I want to eventually reach 2000 Blitz on Lichess and maybe more. Let's see how far I can get before the end of this year.
Thanks for reading...
- All the content is mine unless otherwise stated.
- Screenshots and GIFs from Lichess.org and banner created in Canva.
- Text dividers from @cryptosharan.
I am part of these awesome communities/servers on Hive. Feel free to join.
Click on the banner to join
Click on the banner to join