Lone Wolf 2/11 - zero gain sum
ROUND: 2
GlacialComet (2031) vs JB (1988)
Result: win (10 moves)
Since there's not much to say about the game itself, I'm going to have a think about how White came to blunder a piece so early.
Was White unlucky? To his/her credit, they did not claim this, but you could argue it was so. You hit your opponent's queen 9 times out of 10 you'd expect it to move. You might also point to it being easier to overlook Black's ... Bxf3 response when that very option had been rejected just a couple of moves before.
For what it's worth, my feeling is that this thinking is faulty and is exactly the kind of mental gymnastics we often employ to make us feel better ... but at the expense of missing opportunities to learn.
A less palatable truth - White blundered because s/he put himself in a position to do so.
White was blitzing out the moves right from the start, taking only a few seconds for each turn. This would be all very well if they were the best moves, but they weren't
In the five moves between four (i.e. from the point we left a standard opening position) and eight - right before the blunder - White had made at least two, probably three inaccuracies. 4 Nf3 and 8 0-0 are not 'mistakes' as such but neither are they the most challenging moves. 7 h3, I'm less certain of but may also come into this category. White made them without any thought.
It would only have taken a few moments thought at move 8 for instance for White to consider "Well I need to castle and develop my bishop. If I castle he might go ... Bd6 what do I do then?". Simply asking the question leads immediately to the answer that the queen's bishop has limited options in that scenario and 8 Bf4 is better.
White didn't ask the question though. S/he made natural moves without thinking. When you're doing that for eight moves it should not come as a surprise when you it for a ninth and end up losing a piece.
If my opponent wasn't unlucky, was I fortunate? Again, maybe so - my opponent blundering the game away certainly saved me an hour or two, but perhaps not. This game reminded me of a passage from Chess Improvement: It's All in the Mindset. In an early chapter Peter Wells writes of a game which he'd won as a junior after his opponent had fallen into a known opening trap that simply nets Black a pawn.
"What I particularly recall was my coach's reaction, questioning whether winning a game in this fashion would benefit my learning, and hence whether it was really what I wanted ... I acknowledged the force of his argument and found it troubling."
No need to worry, there will be plenty of educational losses in the future.
ReplyDeleteThese types of blunders I do find rather instructive, since as you point out they are the result of "natural" moves that actually require some thought and calculation. I recently did a similar thing in an unfamiliar opening that didn't look threatening, but had lurking tactics waiting to catch the unthinking player. Just goes to show that if you don't actually know the position from experience, blunder checks are always required.