Hello and Welcome to my blog.
In the past couple of weeks, I have increased the time that I put into playing and practising chess and it has been reflected in my ratings too. For the first time, I crossed 1800 in blitz on lichess.org and even went up to 1830 a couple of days ago.
Well, I got back down under 1800 after a bad session yesterday and since then I have been trying to get back my lost ratings. But ratings are not that important for me, what matters is I am getting better in the game.
I have spent some time learning a new opening with Black and playing games using it. I am talking about the Caro Kann defence. I just watched a couple of YouTube videos and started playing it. I mostly learn by making mistakes and then analysing what went wrong in the opening. These videos are good just to grasp the concept and major points in the opening. One has to play a lot of games to properly understand any opening.
Anyway, here is me trying to show some of the nicest games I played recently but first's let talk about a position that occurred during my games and see if you can spot the best move in that position. I am sure it is going to be educational.
Position of the Day
The following position is from one of the games that I played today. White is struggling already and is down an exchange and a pawn with not a good position but the next move of white is an outright blunder. Can you spot the tactic here?
Time for a good old Knight fork, this was a 3+0 Blitz game and Knights are such a beast in these short-time control. White missed a simple knight move Ng3+ which will double attack on both the white King and Queen and the Queen has to drop, forcing white to resign at this point.
Some captures are really bad!
I was playing with the White pieces in the following game and managed to completely lock my opponent's Bishop out of the game. Game link
Black had put their Light squared bishop on the long diagonal at b2 but I got the opportunity to block that diagonal with my pawns. If you see the move number 15, Bb3 I deliberated and baited my opponent to capture this bishop as the knight came forward to attack it in the prior move.
And black took the bait and captured my knight which I recaptured back with pawn and this just shut down the activity of their bishop on this diagonal as well.
Now it was time to move to the King's side where my opponent just pushed their pawns in front of the king to get rid of the annoying pin but I sacrificed my knight and maintained that pin. The engine says that the Blacks Bishop capture was a big mistake and my capturing two pawns by giving up a knight is the best move. Even though I just got 2 points worth of material in the trade, it was still a good trade but that Knight-Bishop trade was bad for black.
So, not every trade of equal material is an equal trade and each has its consequences.
Exchange when up on material and win!
In the next game, I was playing with black pieces and made a mistake in the opening which cost me a knight but I got back a couple of pieces and I took the game to the endgame where my advantage got bigger and bigger until I exchanged everything and won. Game link
This game is educational for just one reason when you are up a piece with a great position all you have to do is just exchange as many pieces as you can until your extra pieces along with a few pawns can just be too much to handle for your opponent. Winning a good position can sometimes be a huge challenge and one must have to look for ways to exchange as much as you can. But always keep an eye out for any counterattacks while doing it.
I had a passed pawn and just pushed it without caring about saving the stranded knight on a2 as I knew I was about to promote my pawn and win the game.
I am still hovering near 1800 in the Blitz rating. I just checked the last time I shared a post on chess it was more than 3 weeks ago and at that time I was near 1700 rating in Blitz. So, gaining 100 odd points in 3 weeks is a good result. I have been doing some tactics on lichess as well. My puzzle rating is just over 2000 so I am not too terrible at these puzzles, maybe because we know that there is a move in that position and you can take as much time as you can unlike in Blitz where time is a big factor, especially towards the end.
Thanks for reading...
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