Der Alter Goniff

White to Play

What could possibly go wrong?

Something seems seriously wrong with my approach to the game lately.

// posted by ed g. @ 3:34 PM 0 comments

Here's another fairly recent game, from the May-June running of the Marshall Thursday Night tournament.

White: Leon Zukoff
Black: Ed Gaillard

1.e4 c6 2.f4 d5 3.Nf3 dxe4 4.Ng5 Nf6

So I've never seen this before. I figured that 4....Nf6 prevented 5. Bc4 because of 5...Bg4.

5.Bc4!

Oh. Now I realized that 5....Bg4 runs into 6. Qxg4! Nxg4 7.Bxf7+ Kd7 8.Be6+ Kc7 9.Bxg4

I love it when a plan comes together

Is this good for White? Good for Black? You're asking me? All I know is, this is not the cruise Black signed up for when he played the Caro-Kann.

5...e6 6.Nc3 Be7 7.Ncxe4 Nbd7

I didn't feel too bad here. I used up a little too much time on my first five moves, but I've been able to make the last couple of simple developing moves fairly quickly. I don't like that my QB is locked in, but the Pawn on f4 is pretty funny-looking. At least the position looks Caro-Kann-like:

A nice boring Caro-Kann position

8.Nxf7!

Oh. I probably should have seen that coming.

8...Kxf7 9.Ng5+ Ke8 10.Nxe6 Qa5 11.Nxg7+ Kf8 12.Ne6+ Ke8 13.Ng7+ 1/2-1/2

He took the perp. Yay, me.

Grandmaster draw

I suppose that trying for more could be dangerous, since White doesn't have much development. I looked at this with Asa Hoffman, and it looked decent enough for Black.

(Here's a javascript viewer for the game.)

// posted by ed g. @ 11:11 PM 0 comments

I've been playing a lot, but not taking any time to analyze or post my games. Let's see if I can get back in the swing of it.

I've only lost a couple of games in the last three months. Here's one of them. FM Ilye Figler is a guy who really has my number. It's not just that he's a much better player than I am--IM Jay Bonin is at least as good as Figler, for example, but I nick Jay for a draw one out of every three or four games--but something about Figler's style makes me feel defeated before I even push my first Pawn.

This game is a pretty good example of how not to play against the "problem" opponent.

What happened here is that I talked myself out of playing one of my normal openings, because I'd lost with them to Figler before. But it's not like I got horrendous positions; at least one of those games, I had a winning attack until I blundered.

So I played a bad variation of the Modern Defense, and then I went nuts trying to find a way to open the game up for an attack, and so I went down in flames.

I wish I could say that I've learned my lesson, but when I get to my other recent loss, you'll see the same sort of problem in the opening, though at least in that game I didn't flame out so badly.

Here's the earlier Figler game, which I don't seem to have posted before:

Another entry in my rather large collection of "almost my best game ever, but..." games.

// posted by ed g. @ 6:29 PM 0 comments