Teamleague 38 - Round 2 Review

In the end it was a narrow 1.5-2.5 loss for team Current_Affairs against TeamTsubasa in round 2 after a drama filled final game.

HyperMagnus was true to his word in playing unusual openings, in this round after his opponent was more than an hour late he assayed the "unplayed agreed draw" variation, sportingly eschewing the solid and forcing "win by forfeit" line.

Gambiitti had a cracking start to his first real Teamleague game, including forcing his opponent to play 7. ... Qd8, 8. ... Nb8, and 9. ... Bc8 leaving all the Black pieces in their starting positions! I coined the term uberantisteinitzian to describe such a position of moving pieces to the back rank when it's not part of a good plan. Gambiitti's own 9th move offered an elegant pseudo Queen sacrifice to complete the manoeuver.

Things get difficult in Chess when you have a bind on the position but time-trouble conspires to prevent you finding the variation that consolidates your advantage. I don't normally detail too much about our team's defeats, but this game has a special interest for me - White's position became objectively lost but in the next few moves Black set about demonstrating he had no idea how to win the position and in the next 30 moves White made considerably more progress from the weaker position than did his opponent.

Bitter experience has given me plenty of practice playing such games, where correct analysis will only reveal more ways you could lose, but there are ample practical opportunities to exploit. As a twin with my game against Evilthunder from round 1 I might do a future post on this game, looking at the art of positional swindles, encouraging your opponent to make bad decisions, and the psychology of saving games against players who are reticent to make commital moves from a superior position.

One truth of amateur Chess is that more points and half-points are scored by continuing to fight than by playing in perfect accordance with the position, and by virtue of that gambiiti got dangerously close. "Schach ist Kampf!".