FireGilbert and I just finished our first game, and I wanted to write up a bit about it, as I found the whole game very interesting.
It started out as a fairly standard London. I played it slightly different than I usually do, going with a Jobava-style setup, with the knight on C3 rather than the pawn. FireGilbert showed right away that he knows his stuff, and we were off!
Once we both developed a bit and castled on move 10, I settled on going for the king-side attack, putting my bishop in position for my dearest wish of a classic Greek gift sacrifice. Unfortunately, FireGilbert was not on the same page and never allowed it. The ease with which I was able to move my queenside knight over to join the other in front of my king may have made me a long-term convert to this Jobava style.
You would think a double rook lift and getting every single piece involved into an attack would be enough to break through, but every time I thought I had built an overwhelming attack, it seemed like FireGilbert had the answer. Stuffing all those pieces into the small area between both sets of pawns came with the drawback of needing to be constantly aware of the threat of the pawn moving up to f6, forking my knight and rook and potentially trapping my g5 rook even if I managed to get my knight out of there beforehand. Not that I wanted to…that was a glorious outpost square and the key to the counterattack that prevented f6.
After some shuffling around to set up our offense and defense the way we liked them, FireGilbert brought his bishop back to e8. I had largely ignored this piece as a bad bishop, since it was locked outside the pawn structure with nothing to attack, but after he made the move I realized that it added defense to the g6 pawn and made f6 suddenly possible. This was after midnight and I was too tired to calculate properly, so I went to bed on my own turn for the first time ever, pretty sure that I was lost.
Fortunately, a new day and a fresh look discovered the intermediary move Qd1, triggering Kh8, which made Qd3 work, thanks to the knight check available on g6 if f6 was played. Of course, it turns out that stockfish didn’t see f6 as a problem at all and just wanted me to continue with my original plan of bringing the queen up to f4, rendering all my doubt and uncertainty pointless. Following the analysis line, If they played f6, I end up losing slightly on the exchange, but it seems to be a nightmare of revealed and double checks for the opponent.
Some more shuffling and on move 34, my queen was able to get to f6 and get in position to make some pretty dangerous threats on the other side of the board. This led to a trade of my knight for his rook, and a seemingly hanging bishop. If I had taken the bishop, I didn’t see a way to avoid losing my rook to f6 on the next move. I had a bit of trouble deciding between what I saw as a choice between queen vs queen with a pawn advantage and exposed opponent’s king or a double rook vs rook and bishop endgame, and landed on the latter.
The end game was not particularly of note. I had the advantage to begin with, but after the bishop was blundered, it became pretty straightforward to create a passed pawn and FireGilbert resigned. The post-game analysis confirmed that most of what I did was fairly sound, and actually gave me a pretty solid advantage by move 26, but it really didn’t feel that way at all until I finally got the rook ten moves later. It felt like things could fall apart at any moment and I would end up losing a piece to being too aggressive. Probably to the ever-terrifying f6 fork at just the wrong moment.
It felt like it took probably the most solid positional attacking game I have ever played to come out on top. I am genuinely nervous about the next one.
https://www.chess.com/game/daily/492019159