Quote:
Originally Posted by Superfraggle
Yeah, I really enjoyed this game, despite losing. 72UCI fully just outplayed me. Move 19 is where I realized it was going wrong, as I couldn't adequately protect my knight once the rook slid over to D3 thanks to the pin of the knight to my queen. Stockfish looks like it only gives -0.96 on the evaluation there in black's favour, presumably because of the counterattack that was possible.
My next mistake was defending with the rook on F2, rather than moving the queen out of the pin immediately. We both knew that bishop was going to join the attack before my second rook could get there, but I went for the trade with the idea of making the queen leave the D5 pawn unprotected for my bishop to both attack F7 and create a connected passed pawn on D4.
In retrospect, it would have been better to move the queen right away on move 19 and leave my rook on F1 to help attack F7 when my queen got down there. Relying on the bishop to attack that square helped 72UCI finally develop his own bishop and offer up that poisoned rook, which I didn't realize wasn't actually free until after his bishop moved.
From there it was just a clean conversion in an extremely well-played game by 72UCI. I could probably have survived longer with more accurate play, but I think it was a foregone conclusion a that point.
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That capture chain around move 19-20 was very tricky. I definitely would not have found the right move there either—as I said, I’m not even totally sure I understand stockfish’s idea—which seems to be to give up the knight but put the queen on the f file, so that the bishop and queen both point to f7 at the end of the sequence.
And even then, stockfish still gives a slight advantage to black—around -.8 or -.9 or so.