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 earlier today. Both's backrank is weak as black is about to recapture the knight and get material equality. But is there something more powerful here for Black?
Well, it is a checkmate in 1, congrats if you spotted Re8#. It looks like the knight is covering the square but after the Rook moves it gets pinned because our Queen is placed on this critical diagonal. Too bad, I missed this tactic in my game but I still won the game easily. My pieces were way too active and gave me a significant advantage.
I need to work on my tactics a lot, normally I would spot these one-move checkmates but I missed it during my game as I simply recaptured the Knight and thought my position was anyway winning xD
Black's Pawn Storm!
I was White in the next game where I misplayed my opening and got in a slightly inferior position.
Black's central pawns were too strong for me and at some point, I blundered my Bishop but luckily Black also missed it and that was a turning point for me.
I analysed the games afterwards and saw a blunder which was not easy to spot so in the end I was still much better. Black had to resign and must be so mad to butcher a great position like that.
These were 3+0 Blitz games so we can in time trouble near the end of the game and one can expect a lot of mistakes and blunders at that time.
A clinical game
Blitz games are full of mistakes, especially in 3+0 time control but once in a while I play a smooth game where I give no chance to my opponent and this was one of those good games.
I used my favourite opening with Black, the Sicilian Dragon. I managed to shut down their light square bishop, got a great outpost for my knight and it was smooth sailing after that. I even managed to forcefully exchange the Queen's and I was winning just by having a far superior position and almost all pieces of mine were better than my counterpart's pieces.
My Rooks got the beautiful open 'b' file while my knights got nice squares and eventually managed to exchange everything with a winning endgame.
I even sacrificed my Queen for a mere pawn as I didn't want to get black any chance nor did I want to get in the time trouble. Without increments, it sometimes gets trickier.
But that was a smooth game and got me a nice and easy win.
Now I am moving quickly to the 1700 Bltiz rating. Today's session was very productive as I gained 15 rating points with 5 wins and 2 losses out of 7 games. There was one game I lost on time despite having a better position. I am still trying to play faster but accurately and it gets tough sometimes to manage the time.
I am only playing Blitz because I want to improve my speed as well as positional gameplay and don't want to spend hours playing just a couple of games of Rapid. I would more likely play Blitz games and analyse those games which improves me much faster than long-drawn Rapid games.
Maybe I will play some Rapid in the future. However, I won't touch the Bullet for some time, it just normalises making blunders lol
Thanks for reading...
Until next game...
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