A slightly bitter second round - My gameplay and review

We had the 2nd round of the Hive Chess Tournament season 12 this friday as usual, an event organized by our friend @stayoutoftherz. Finally after a long wait my laptop arrived yesterday and with this I can continue posting content here on hive. Also something that I missed a lot was to comment my games while playing and today I could do it but with not so favorable results.

This time we played a 7 round swiss tournament with a quite “short” time control 5+0 , that's right, without increment which is a bit challenging, things get very ugly when the clock is ticking down lol. I managed 4 points (4 wins and 3 losses). In one of the games I had a problem with the mouse and I don't know why but it suddenly stopped working and I had to play with the mousepad of the laptop which is super uncomfortable. When I lost that game I decided to stop the recording and play on the phone because you can imagine that situation.

Anyway, I have to practice again the skill of talking while playing xd. Here I leave some games played for me today:

@Char-meleon vs @vjap55

I started the tournament losing the first game. After analyzing it I see that I had some minor problems in the opening, more specifically I played very mechanically and missed the opportunity to hunt down White's black squared bishop with the strong 8...)Nh5 instead I played the pawn to d6 which is an unambitious scheme and White is in a good position to keep an eye on this point. After a couple of more moves, I started the assault on the queenside.

This was a somewhat correct plan but I ended up losing a pawn without any compensation.

But the final mistake would come in the rook endgame in which I hastily captured the b-pawn and the game turned into a kings and pawns endgame totally lost for me. However, my saving move was 36...) f6+ which would force the white king to retreat and then I could take the b-pawn and maintain equality.

@vjap55 vs @Akshak

Here was something very ironic. As you can see in the video, my mouse started to crash and it was very uncomfortable to finish this game because I had to do it from the mousepad of the laptop and not to mention the short time on the clock.

The game was quite interesting from the theoretical point of view in which it seems that Black was well prepared in this line of the Pelikan. Unfortunately I played the middlegame very inaccurately and mistook a tactical plan with c5, instead I should have developed the bishop to e2 and moved my king to the g2 square and tried to achieve a safe setup. This idea of sacrificing the pawn on c5 was wrong and Black held the advantage until the end.

@jaki01 vs @vjap55

It looked like things were going to end up pretty decent after I was able to win a few games. In the last game I completely collapsed in what could have been a more interesting encounter. Again I mixed in some Italian/Spanish ideas where Black plays h6-g5 to knock White's bishop out of play, however on this occasion this idea doesn't work as my bishop is on b4 instead of c5 which would prevent White's quick f4 advance by the pin. The rest is history, white finished this off well.

I hope to be able to improve a little for next week since I have the national chess tournament for the visually impaired. I will be informing you about my performance in this upcoming tournament.

Don't forget to leave your impressions in the comments and let me know what you think of these games. Thanks for the visit and see you next time.

This post has as a 10% beneficiary @badge-646464 to contribute to the league's reward pool.

Infraction music is used in the video