Neat little position from a recent game:

Here's a position from a recent game that I loved. I (black) had to make several "only" moves which surprised me as this position seemed overwhelming for black. Play this position as black against your favorite engine and see if you get the victory.

LOL epic fail on my part. Looking at your diagram, I decided on a line I wanted to try. After plugging the position into my engine to test it, I realized that not only was my planned first move illegal, but if it *was* legal, my planned follow-up also would have been illegal. I was looking at the following "line":



When I realized the extreme degree of fail on my part, I gave up on analyzing it myself, and just let the computer take a look. Major kudos on finding all those moves, many of them aren't even Firebird's first choice until after a good minute or more of analysis (at which point it "finds" them, and eventually does agree that your line is best).

Why did icc take a bunch of people's chess960 records away? Though you can still see them using pstat.

cuz haters gonna hate

i really need to get back on icc

chess960 sounds like an exciting pool !

There's a 960 pool now??????? That does sound like fun.

Man chess diagrams are so exciting when you haven't played for a couple of weeks. When you're playing everyday it's just like you look at it and: "Meh.. xxx standard. Next." When you haven't played for a couple of weeks you look at it and the whole board is alive with ideas and possibilities. Unfortunately not necessarily a good thing when there is indeed only one proper idea.. but it's still interesting.

For anyone following along with my correspondence thread, and wondering what caliber of play they can expect out of a correspondence game I play, here are the last two games I have finished, both as black, one win, one loss.

[Event "Online Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2010.05.26"]
[Round "1"]
[White "Villain"]
[Black "BobJoeJim"]
[Result "1-0"]
[WhiteElo "1782"]
[BlackElo "1678"]
[TimeControl "1 in 3 days"]

1. d4 d5 2. c4 c6 3. e3 Nf6 4. Nc3 e6 5. Nf3 Nbd7 6. Bd3 Bd6 7. O-O O-O 8. b3 e5 9. dxe5 Nxe5 10. Bb2 dxc4 11. Bc2 cxb3 12. Bxb3 Nxf3+ 13. Qxf3 Qc7 14. h3 Bd7 15. Rad1 Be6 16. Bc2 Be5 17. Qe2 Bxc3 18. Bxc3 Bxa2 19. Bxf6 b5 20. Qg4 g6 21. e4 Bc4 22. Qg5 1-0

[Event "Online Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2010.04.22"]
[Round "1"]
[White "Villain"]
[Black "BobJoeJim"]
[Result "0-1"]
[WhiteElo "1613"]
[BlackElo "1682"]
[TimeControl "1 in 7 days"]

1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Nf6 4. Nc3 Nxe4 5. Nxe4 d5 6. Bxd5 Qxd5 7. d3 Bf5 8. O-O O-O-O 9. Re1 f6 10. Bd2 Nd4 11. Nxd4 exd4 12. Bf4 Bb4 13. Bd2 Bxd2 14. Nxd2 h5 15. h3 g5 16. Ne4 Bxe4 17. Rxe4 Rhe8 18. Qe2 Qb5 19. Re1 Rxe4 20. Qxe4 Qxb2 21. Qf5+ Kb8 22. Qxf6 Rc8 23. Qxg5 Qxc2 24. Qxh5 Qxd3 25. Re8 b6 26. Rxc8+ Kxc8 27. Qe8+ Kb7 28. Qe1 Qc2 29. f3 d3 30. Qe4+ Ka6 31. h4 Qc1+ 32. Kf2 d2 33. Qd3+ b5 34. Qg6+ c6 35. Qd6 Qe1# 0-1

first one looks fine until Bxc3?? and Bxa2??, even if you didn't see that you were losing by force you shouldn't be so keen to exchange a bishop for a knight and give him a monster bishop pair.

second one, Rhe8 looks strange, again it's one where it may be a tactical blunder (Rxe8 Rxe8 Qxh5 and you can't play Re2 so I don't see much compensation for a pawn) but even if not, it's positionally inconsistent. The last 3 moves you weakened your pawns in order to try and attack on the kingside, now you are deciding to exchange rooks, losing your attacking chances but remaining with weakened pawns. It's kind of a mess after that, you might have misplayed it tactically (ask Rybka, not me!) but you showed better positional understanding of the queen ending than your opponent: no amount of extra kingside pawns on the second rank is enough to compensate for the passed pawn on d4.

Pretty much exactly what Firebird told me. I had a solid position, giving no real compensation for the pawn, according to its evaluation, prior to Bxc3 and Bxa2. Obviously I missed the tactical part where I'm losing by force after that. I thought I could win the pawn cleanly, and that two pawns for the bishop pair would be plenty of compensation. His counterattack proved otherwise. Standard case of greed = blunder, that I need to be careful of.

Confirmed, tactical blunder, I didn't even notice that I was dropping the pawn. And no, there isn't any compensation for it that you missed, I just got lucky that my opponent was as blind to the free pawn as I was. Definitely felt good about the ending though, I had no idea why my opponent was willing to let me get the passed d pawn, but I knew it was going to work out well for me and it did

do you move the pieces when you analyse?

Really, even claiming that I "analyze" at all would be ambitious. I go over every game I play (blitz or correspondence, I don't really play anything else) with an engine, but I do it quickly in "infinite analysis" mode, just checking to see how each of my moves compares to the computer's evaluation. I give myself a quick pat on the back when my move is the same as the computer's, ignore moves where it isn't, but the difference is miniscule in terms of numeric evaluation, and when it's a blunder I take a few seconds to figure out why. Like after Rhe8 the evaluation shifted from about 0.5 in my favor to about 0.5 against me. I looked at the computer's best line for about five seconds, smacked myself on the forehead ("D'OH, that drops a pawn!") and moved on.

What I DON'T do is actually analyze in a way that would actually do much to help me improve. Recognizing that Rhe8 dropped a pawn, after the fact, doesn't really by itself do anything to reduce the frequency with which I will make similar moves in the future. If I cared more about improvement I would definitely analyze more seriously (and play some slower games, and do a lot of other things that I don't). I mostly just play chess for the fun of it though, and haven't been working much on improving lately.

I meant when you are actually playing the game

If you are trying to improve your OTB game it is probably best not to move the pieces, but if you are trying to play the best you can you should play through all the possible variations on a real chess board or the likes of Chessbase.

Oh! A mixture actually. I do the majority of my analysis just looking at the position, without moving anything. For particularly complex lines that I'm not sure I'm right about though, I will sometimes pop up an analysis board and play through a few moves to make sure I'm not missing anything.

On the other hand, in a lot of my correspondence games I don't take advantage of the format to actually analyze at all, and just blitz out the moves after 10-20 seconds. That's actually one of the reasons I started the other thread, to force myself, in at least one game, to take it seriously and actually think through every move.

I just feel like you couldn't have really missed the Qxh5 idea in the second game if you had slowed down to look at the natural consequence of Re8 and played through it on a board. The first one, you can miss either way, it takes a bit more experience before you can definitely say "I shouldn't ever make a mistake like that".

Oh yeah, definitely that particular move is one I would almost certainly have caught if I played it through. I'm pretty sure that was one of the moves I just blitzed off, and didn't think about much. Not that that excuses anything, I still played the move, lol.

Kind of cute position from blitz just before - I'm Black and my opponent has just played Qg3. Obviously I'm crushing him already, but this move neatly twists the knife. It's pretty trivial to spot but I'll put it in spoiler tags in case lower-rated players want to figure it out themselves.

heh, i was thinking bd3- patzer. ur line bxg2! is a mate in 10, bd3 is mate in 11

Yeah Bd3 works too no doubt, I'm too lazy to try to force wins so I just went with winning another rook

Just came by for the first time to say hi.

Anyway, how can this be a low content thread? You guys really have high standards.

Welcome to the chess forum! This is definitely much more high content than the LC threads in other forums I visit.

Yeah, there's a lot of great stuff in this thread. "Low content" here just means "anything the poster doesn't feel is worth starting a thread about", but many of those posts lead to genuinely good discussion that are anything but low content.

Was railing a titled game on ICC, Black (IM stack) to play with 1:15 White has 0:31 left.
Black lost

Never give up?