Game 1: Italian Game, sprcow(1402) vs. 78654231(1294), Wednesday 1/2/2019
I committed to playing immediately after I get home from work in order to help solidify these games as a habit, but I decided it was okay to take the trash out and change the cat litter first, because it is Wednesday. Then I got myself some water, locked the cats out of the office, put on some random music, and settled in to play.
I've decided to stick with 15+10 time control for this project (15 minutes per player, plus 10 seconds per move), which is a decent compromise between having enough time to think and finishing the game at a reasonable rate.
I got White and opened with my current standard, 1.e4. We went into a pretty typical Italian game and its accompanying densely-packed mid-board. Notice by move 7, all 4 knights and 3 of the 4 bishops have been developed and both players have 2 or 3 pawns vying for the central squares. Very 'principled', as chess players who know what they're talking about would say.
One of white's plans in the Italian game is to play pawn a2 to a4, carving out space on the queen side and giving the light square bishop a place to retreat. It's nice if you can get most of the rest of your pieces situated before you do this, however, so white does a lot of fiddly moves to protect their pieces - castle and play Re1 to guard the e4 pawn, pawns on c3, d3, maybe a knight on d2. The order you do these things depends on what black does, but eventually you sort of run out of prep work and need to do something to seize the initiative before black does.
However, when black plays something slow - extraneous pawn moves are the most common - white can sometimes strike earlier. USUALLY this means pushing d4. Black hasn't castled and has a weird position? Open the center!
In this case, however, the move that jumped out as an opportunity was 7...Qd7. It's not a bad move, but why hasn't black castled yet? Maybe they're planning to castle queen side? I'm not always great at identifying mid-game plans, but this was the clue that I should consider a queenside assault. Normally I go for the a4 push, but in this case I felt like I could use the slight tempo edge from attacking the bishop with b4 first. Looking at the mega database, b4 is vastly preferred by master players here, so I'm happy with that decision!
After a strong queenside advance, black's pieces seemed cramped but I wasn't sure how to strike, so I opted for a defensive move with 11.Re1 - typical in Italian positions, but in this case specifically intended to defend e4 to free my d2 Knight to roam. It's kind of passive on the 2nd rank, especially now that my light square bishop is not at risk from a Na5 attack.
Now my opponent is clearly out of theory as well and the moves start getting weird. When you're getting cramped, one way to equalize is to trade some pieces, and so it does make some sense that my opponent tried 11...Be6?!, but black would have been far better of just castling. It's tempting to just take the piece, and it's not a bad move, but in a way it feels like you're letting black off the hook a bit.
It seemed likely that black would do the trade for me and I could bring my knight into the game for free, so I tried to increase the pressure instead. Black obliged and traded bishops and then played the losing move, 13...d5??, which immediately drops a center pawn, allows me to damage black's remaining pawn structure, and lets me open a file for my rook to attack the king all at once. In terms of material loss it's only 1 point, but the engine has white at +5 already.
My opponent resigned after Nfxe5 (Ncxe5 and Nxb6 were both good as well), though at our skill levels, I might have been tempted to play on in their position. I could always make a mistake, after all!
It was not a very long game, but all in all I'm still pretty happy with it. Always nice to start off with a win.
As a side note, I ran the game through Chess.com's Complete Analysis tool and it was interesting how it interpreted the game. It thought that 8.b4 actually shed significant advantage (though didn't categorize it as a mistake), but on longer manual evaluation with an engine in that position, b4 is not far from the top, and more masters play b4 in that position than any of the other moves in my database. It also said I only played the best move 30% of the time and gave me a CAPS score of about 63, which is a below-1200 score. I always take those stats with a grain of salt, but going through and comparing my moves with the database and also with longer engine evals, I'm happy with almost all of them and think that CAPS is underselling me today!
I've decided to stick with 15+10 time control for this project (15 minutes per player, plus 10 seconds per move), which is a decent compromise between having enough time to think and finishing the game at a reasonable rate.
I got White and opened with my current standard, 1.e4. We went into a pretty typical Italian game and its accompanying densely-packed mid-board. Notice by move 7, all 4 knights and 3 of the 4 bishops have been developed and both players have 2 or 3 pawns vying for the central squares. Very 'principled', as chess players who know what they're talking about would say.
One of white's plans in the Italian game is to play pawn a2 to a4, carving out space on the queen side and giving the light square bishop a place to retreat. It's nice if you can get most of the rest of your pieces situated before you do this, however, so white does a lot of fiddly moves to protect their pieces - castle and play Re1 to guard the e4 pawn, pawns on c3, d3, maybe a knight on d2. The order you do these things depends on what black does, but eventually you sort of run out of prep work and need to do something to seize the initiative before black does.
However, when black plays something slow - extraneous pawn moves are the most common - white can sometimes strike earlier. USUALLY this means pushing d4. Black hasn't castled and has a weird position? Open the center!
In this case, however, the move that jumped out as an opportunity was 7...Qd7. It's not a bad move, but why hasn't black castled yet? Maybe they're planning to castle queen side? I'm not always great at identifying mid-game plans, but this was the clue that I should consider a queenside assault. Normally I go for the a4 push, but in this case I felt like I could use the slight tempo edge from attacking the bishop with b4 first. Looking at the mega database, b4 is vastly preferred by master players here, so I'm happy with that decision!
After a strong queenside advance, black's pieces seemed cramped but I wasn't sure how to strike, so I opted for a defensive move with 11.Re1 - typical in Italian positions, but in this case specifically intended to defend e4 to free my d2 Knight to roam. It's kind of passive on the 2nd rank, especially now that my light square bishop is not at risk from a Na5 attack.
Now my opponent is clearly out of theory as well and the moves start getting weird. When you're getting cramped, one way to equalize is to trade some pieces, and so it does make some sense that my opponent tried 11...Be6?!, but black would have been far better of just castling. It's tempting to just take the piece, and it's not a bad move, but in a way it feels like you're letting black off the hook a bit.
It seemed likely that black would do the trade for me and I could bring my knight into the game for free, so I tried to increase the pressure instead. Black obliged and traded bishops and then played the losing move, 13...d5??, which immediately drops a center pawn, allows me to damage black's remaining pawn structure, and lets me open a file for my rook to attack the king all at once. In terms of material loss it's only 1 point, but the engine has white at +5 already.
My opponent resigned after Nfxe5 (Ncxe5 and Nxb6 were both good as well), though at our skill levels, I might have been tempted to play on in their position. I could always make a mistake, after all!
It was not a very long game, but all in all I'm still pretty happy with it. Always nice to start off with a win.
As a side note, I ran the game through Chess.com's Complete Analysis tool and it was interesting how it interpreted the game. It thought that 8.b4 actually shed significant advantage (though didn't categorize it as a mistake), but on longer manual evaluation with an engine in that position, b4 is not far from the top, and more masters play b4 in that position than any of the other moves in my database. It also said I only played the best move 30% of the time and gave me a CAPS score of about 63, which is a below-1200 score. I always take those stats with a grain of salt, but going through and comparing my moves with the database and also with longer engine evals, I'm happy with almost all of them and think that CAPS is underselling me today!
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