Push too hard and you might lose ⎸Road to GM, Game 9

May 21, 2018 NHaselton Uncategorized

Hanging PawnsMon, May 21, 2018 10:24amURL:
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S. Tomic vs M. Blaga, B38 Sicilian, Accelerated Dragon, Maroczy Bind
2018 Croatian Cup Finals, Round 6, Mali Lošinj, 05/20/18

The Cup has finished. I went as a substitute, but I still got to play 4 rounds (out of 6). I scored 3/4, 75%, which is farm more than expected. My opponents were all higher rated than me and their avg rating was 1970.

In this game I was playing a very experienced opponent rated a bit more than 200 ELO points higher than me. We entered an accelerated dragon and I went for my standard Maroczy bind setup with f3.

I got an opening edge, but I found a passive plan and threw away my advantage. The position was all zeroes, completely drawn, but my opponent decided to push for a win, since he was much higher rated. Unfortunately for him, I had already calculated all the risky ways for him to try for an advantage, and they were all losing.

He went for it and was losing in two moves. I chose tricky way to convert. A move which I didn’t calculate well enough, and we could’ve played for another hour, but my opponent luckily resigned and saved me 45 minutes of brain exercise.

You can check out all the results here (my team is HASK Mladost, Zagreb): http://chess-results.com/tnr348940.aspx?lan=13&art=20&turdet=YES&flag=30&snr=9

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