For my first three moves I am setting up my pieces in the classic London system shape, until black’s move three of pawn to g5 means that I need to retreat my bishop, and then follow this with pawn to h3 for move five, in order to allow an escape for the bishop in case there are any more advances against him by the black pawns. The game then continues as far as move eight, at which point I think my opponent makes quite a bad mistake of moving his pawn again to g4. I am able to take advantage of this by taking his pawn with my h file pawn, which in turn opens up the h file for my rook. Black then follows this with another error by moving his knight from g8 which enables me to take the bishop on his third rank with my rook on move eleven.
Having gotten my rook into this forward position, I then manage to keep it on black’s third rank, from where it poses a contant threat for the rest of the game. On his thirteenth move black attempts to move his king out of danger by castling queenside, but I answer this immediatly by launching an attack on this side of the board with my queen moving to a4. My moves fifteen and sixteen are also good as I move my knight up the board to enable it to join the attack, but there is always a danger of getting carried away when one seems to be winning at chess, and when I move my queen to b4 on move eighteen, thinking I am a move away from check mating my opponent, I fail to spot his knight which I am then forced to exchange for my queen.
This stupid blunder makes the game much more evenly balanced, and from moves twenty to twenty-four, both myself and my opponent are attempting to batter away at the defences around our respective kings, in order to try and gain the initiative and control the game. On move twenty-five it seems as though it is black who has won this battle as his queen and knight begin a relentless attack on my king, which continues for the next nine moves, during which time all I can do for the most part is to passively move my king out of check. This attack culminates on move thirty-five, with my opponent’s queen taking my rook, which leaves me six points down in material.
All is not lost however as I still have four pieces (a knight, a rook and two bishops), left on the board, and whilst none of them is defending my king, they are all aligned against my opponent’s king, and the break in his onslaught as he eliminates my rook, enables me sieze the initiative with an attacking move, so that this time it is my opponent’s king that is in check. Now it is my turn to be relentless, and I allow my competitor no chance to come back again as his king is forced to move out of check for the next three moves, with the ‘knockout punch’ finally being landed by my knight on move thirty-nine.
In addition to the three reasons I gave for liking this game at the start of this post, I think I might also add that I thoroughly enjoyed playing it because of the way the control of the game and the initiative in attack switched first from me, then to my opponent and then back to myself again. As with all of the games I have written about so far on this blogsite, it was a correspondence based game with time allowed for each player to move, and so perhaps lacked some of the excitement than can be attained from a ‘live’ game against the clock. Even so, I found the way everything seemed to be balanced on a knife edge quite gripping and this type of all or nothing situation where one or other of the players seems certain to conclude without a lengthy war of attrition that goes on and on until the end game is reached is really quite exhilarating. Also, it seemed to me that there was a certain amount of poetry about my last few moves of the game, with all four of my remaining pieces involved in the final onslaught and moving out of one another’s line of fire to create discovered checks, and push the enemy king from pillar to post in one last all out surge for victory.
