Lone Wolf 3/11 - a village and a confession
ROUND: 3
High Silence (1857) vs JB (2005)
Result: win (24 moves)
This blog has changed a great deal since I first started it at the beginning of last summer. What remains true, however, is the principle motivation behind it:-
Build A Village
a concept I picked up from Stuhlberg and Magness' Peak Performance.
It was a delight, then, to end up with a round three pairing with somebody who had contributed a comment to the blog just a couple of weeks ago.
When you look at the game what do you see? An up-and-down opening … a middlegame that tips my way … a time trouble blunder? Is that what the game looks like?
I should confess that if the game had gone on just one move longer, it could had a very different finish.
position after 23 Rd1
Here I played 23 … Qc7 after which White blundered his knight. What if he’d retreated?
My thinking behind shifting the queen to the c-file was I'd gain a tempo on the knight and then go to c2 to force the exchange of queens. Well after 24 Ne2 Qc2, 25 Rc1, I can indeed get the queens off the board, but only at the cost of getting back-rank mated.
I like to think I’d have spotted this before playing my 24th move. After all, I had noticed my 8th-rank weakness before playing Qc7. My initial concern that
23 … Qc7, 24 d5 Qxf4, 25 dxe6 would allow a queen-sac and mate after 26 Qd8+ Rxd8, 27 Rxd8+ was quickly replaced by the realisation that the recapture 26 … fxe6 gives my king an escape route.
So I like to think I’d have noticed that 24 … Qc2 was a massive blunder. Would I though? Really?
Luckily for me, we’ll never know.
Hah, great seeing this! I'd been watching the blog to see if you'd cover our game. Yes unfortunately I committed a doozy as Andras Toth would say. Before that, I'd felt somewhat uncomfortable (without merit, I realized during analysis) in the opening since I'm just now going back to allowing the Nimzo-Indian and I'm working out how to play against it. I had actually played it pretty well I think up until, as we discussed, my Bf4 move where I tried to get clever and complicated instead of going for the clearer move (Bxf6 and looking at c4-c5). Choosing the wrong times to keep the position sharp has become a pitfall of mine. I had seen some chance of a back-rank mate later but yes surely you would have seen it. At the time of my blunder, I had no good plan anyway but it would been interesting to continue had it not been for the horse-suicide. Good game and nice to play you!
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