Hello and Welcome to my blog.
It feels like ages since I wrote about chess and played it with some seriousness. If you are following the chess news, you must know that the Candidates' tournament just finished and an Indian young grandmaster, D. Gukesh won the tournament and now will challenge the current World Champion, Ding Liren. Gukesh became the youngest player in history to win the Candidates tournament. To be honest I didn't expect him to win, I am a big fan of Praggananda and was supporting him.
I remember when I came to Hive, the first post I wrote was about how Pragnannada defeated Magnus Carlsen, then World Champion. But Gukesh surprised everyone. What a dream tournament it must be for him.
Well, Gukesh inspired me to play some chess games as well. Watching the chess of the highest caliber motivated me and that's how I play a few games of my own. Do I still have some spark left? It was time to find out.
I was doing badly at remembering openings, especially the Caro Kan defence that I learned freshly before I took a long break from Chess. So, it was tough to not get confused by the move order. Maybe that's the reason I was getting a tough position out of the opening.
I will show you a few games but before that let me show you an interesting position that occurred during one of my games today.
White to play and win!
Black was pushing and I felt White was in trouble because of the Black's passed pawn and white two ugly pawns on the 'h' file. And if Black can exchange the Queens and pawns they are winning. So, black pushed f4 in the hope of Queen exchange. But can you spot the blunder?
Okay, this was easy. We all know Queen before the King is not a good combination and we can punish this quick move by just sliding our rook to g5 and pinning the Queen. Now the Queen has no option but to give herself away for the Rook and White is winning that position easily.
I was playing with the Black pieces in the following game and managed to somehow get an advantage right at the end. Game link
I missed up on some moves in the Caro-Kann defence and got a bad position out of the opening. It could have been even worse if White pushed and played on with the heavy pieces but it decided to exchange. The middle game looked bad for me as I had two isolated pawns on the queenside. White had a sizable advantage.
White won a couple of more pawns and it looked like over for me. They just had to exchange the rooks and queen for their passed pawn. But they tried to become too active with the King and got punished. Sometimes, moving your king to the centre of the position with two rooks still on the board is not a wise decision.
I won a couple of pawns and the game was looking drawish. But I don't know why on move #45 they went King h6 instead of King h4 and that was a big blunder. My h pawn was too strong and faster than their c pawn.
White had to sacrifice their rook for the pawn who was about to promote and this gave me a good win at the end. It was a hard-fought battle, I was down almost the entire game but winning these kinds of games always feels good.
There is a famous saying in Chess, "Winning a winning position is not easy"
In the next game, I was playing with Black pieces again and played some dubious openings (the computer says Hungarian Opening). They put their queen out so early in the attack which gave me some ideas to trap their queen. Game link
But how to trap the Queen? It is a slow process sometimes you need bait, sometimes just sheer luck. I got the bait as my b7 pawn. To be honest, I just blundered this pawn but later realised it could help me develop my pieces with attacking moves. And queen is a bad defensive piece so all I had to do was attack it with my knight.
White Queen on a6 looked very uncomfortable so I tried to block off all its escaping square. I had planned to bring back my bishop after move after move 12 but failed to realise that it was my Knight who was getting trapped not their queen. But I took this little defeat and focused on their King's side.
White was grossly underdeveloped and I could exploit this. With their Queen on the other side and just an active bishop, I decided to exchange that light square bishop so I get better control of the light squares around the King and Queen + Knight is a great attacking combo. We saw it in the last Candidates match as well.
White decided to give back some material in hopes of developing its minor pieces on the Queen side. Their entire Queen side was sleeping. But it was too late, once my Queen started chopping off the pawn with my rook controlling the 'e' file, it was quite difficult for them to control all the attacks. I managed to win their Queen as well and the rest was just exchanging everything and trying to make a lot of Queens just to troll my opponent. But they resigned before I could see four Queens on the board.
I played a few more 3+2 Blitz games and lost a few. My final rating was 1814 at the end of the day. It is not a bad rating and my five-year-old self would be proud of this a lot but I still want to cross 2000 on Lichess. I know the ratings on Lichess are inflated than the Chess.com ratings, but still, 1800 is not that bad.
I played chess after a couple of months and it was a fun experience. Could have gone a lot more worse if I had lost more. But it was not bad!
And once again congrats to Gukesh for winning the Candidates 2024. What a legend!
Until next game...
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