How not to defend your castle

I'm not really good enough to post lessons on here but I just played this game against gmh007.

'##, play without chesscomputer ####' he says,

yup he got whupped,

2 games running with the same move, its a good example of mistakes I see defending the castle, particularly; Playing h3 does not protect your castle, it is a point of attack for your opponent, In this game there are 2 mistakes I can see (plus swapping the bishop)

23 h3. This allows me to fork h3 and anything that is on f3, forcing you to swap the pawn and open up my rook. You can also, sometimes sacrifice your bishop against it (as in the first game). Lastly you can hang a piece there guarded by h5, a fishing pole. h3 is to be avoided if possible.

24 g3. This piece is loose! my bishop pins f2, so g3 in unguarded.

These 2 moves were supposed to defend the castle but lost the game.



Belows the first game with a bishop sac on h3 which was not sound but I got lucky 🙂

h3 qand g3 were moves 9 and 10, not 23, n 24 duhhhh

don't know what i was thinking then..... but hey... thats how you get your castle smashed...

I know this is a rather inelegant post, as are the games, tho you do have 3 castle traps there, they didn't fall for the first one and wasn't graded much lower 50 points or so, but i don't like rudeness in games, in blitz i would stop playing n watch a youtube video instead, a bit on the forums is fine but if you say that sort of thing every time you loose why play chess. I never complain at loosing, I appreciate it.

In the first game, I don't think I'd call h3 a mistake. g3 was, though, allowing you to open up the protection from his king.

In the second game, the white's opening looks pretty questionable to me.

In the first game I fail to see why h3 was played. Not necessarily a mistake but it violates some opening principals, like develop your army! White should have looked at getting his Queens Knight into the game. In the second game, h3 has absolutely no point except to prevent a pin on his knight which I wouldn't see as an issue in that position - But the major issue with that move is it didn't develop anything. With black playing a gambit like that white should look for quick developing moves because black has the tempo. For white in both games- remember development! In the first game, swapping the bishop only helped black to develop his queen. So that is why swapping the bishop was really not a good idea. You wasted a move to develop it, then just killed it. The black knight was going nowhere fast - so there was no plan involved. I don't think white had a plan in any of the games except to wait for you to make a mistake... instead, white made the mistakes and you capitalized.

With the attitude white has, I doubt they will see much improvement. One must love to lose and analyze that loss deeply to improve ones game next time!

Addendum:
In the Queen's Gambit Declined semi-Slav there is quite often a h3 played by white to give the queens bishop an escape square to keep in on the h2-b8 diagonal. This move is played with a deliberate plan in mind. Players who make moves like that have to know why they are doing it!

Originally posted by ChessJester
In the first game I fail to see why h3 was played. Not necessarily a mistake but it violates some opening principals, like develop your army! White should have looked at getting his Queens Knight into the game. In the second game, h3 has absolutely no point except to prevent a pin on his knight which I wouldn't see as an issue in that position - But the eliberate plan in mind. Players who make moves like that have to know why they are doing it!

I felt a bit bad about posting this after, its just the comment wound me up, and i thought they were alright games, I loose like that quite a lot like that. But I did feel in both games he almost gave me them. In both whites dark squared bishop is not defending the kingside making my attack easier. I think the game with the bishop sac may have been drawn with best play.