Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Won my game last night.

Finally, a victory. Unfortunately, it was against much weaker opposition. I didn't use even 10 minutes of my time. We played the Dragon - he didn't play it quite right and I had a little room for improvement, but that much didn't take too long. Then he made a mistake that dropped a pawn with a second pawn falling soon after (no thought for those, very simple calculation), but he had a little counterplay that got him a pawn back. We were, at that point, simplified down to a two rooks vs two rooks endgame with my rooks a bit more active, but that is still fairly drawish. I was preparing to burn through a lot of time grinding it out. But... my opponent agreed to trade off one of the rooks and it left him in the unenviable position of either leaving me free to terrorize the 7th rank with my rook - he'd get his rook over to my side as well, though I'd get the best of the situation - or trade the last pair of rooks into a dead lost pawn endgame. If I were him, I'd choose to keep the rooks on the board even though it doesn't look pretty at all. He chose to trade rooks into the pawn endgame either of us could probably play in our sleep. So I ended up not having to think much. I could tell by the way he went into the pawn endgame that he definitely thought he had better chances there than in the rook endgame. 3+2 vs 2+2 just isn't going to work, though.

BONUS: I delivered a pawn checkmate.

No comments:

Post a Comment