Please tear this apart for me!!! Thanks

I am trying to wise up. I played black, can someone be brutal... Thanks!

Any number of moves are better than 18. ... Kf7 - why move your king?

Originally posted by kerbouchard1100
I am trying to wise up. I played black, can someone be brutal... Thanks!



[pgn] [Event "Open invite"] [Site "http://www.redhotpawn.com"] [Date "2010.11.21"] [EndDate "2010.11.26"] [Round "?"] [White "Aramesh"] [Black "kerbouchard1100"] [WhiteRating "1315"] [BlackRating "1217"] [WhiteELO "1315"] [BlackELO "1217"] [Result "1-0"] [GameId "7945197 Kg3g4 47. Kg1f2 c5 48. Qe1g1 Kg4xh4 49. Kf2xf3 c4 50. Qg1g4 1-0 [/pgn]

16...n-g4 is an exchanging combination and the game would be pretty easy from there. Very well played in the opening-other than hanging the pawn on move 9(it attacks your queen if nxc6)


Wow, didn't go over the whole game the first time.c5 was a questionable decisionat the time you made it. It is a good strategic idea, but poor tactically at the moment....especially followed up by k-e8 allowing dxc5 coming(instead of bxf6) with the initiative for white. R-b8 looks like an attacking move but is sort of superficial. As stated before n-g4 was the way to go. But after you don't play that q-e7 and THEN c5 is much safer play.

For instance 18. q-e7 which incidentally also threatens n-e4 forking bishop and knight. When you are ahead be patient and don't panic when they start throwing pieces at you.

I just annotated the opening for you. Someone else will probably step up and take a look at the rest of it.

I'd recommend using a good opening database [365chess.com is my favorite] for the first 5-10 moves or so, or until your opponent deviates. Playing correspondence chess from pure instinct can be a bad idea unless you find yourself in a very familiar opening system.

Originally posted by EinZweiDrei
[pgn][Event "Open invite"] [Site "http://www.redhotpawn.com"] [Date "2010.11.21"] [Round "?"] [White "Aramesh"] [Black "kerbouchard1100"] [Result "1-0"] [WhiteElo "1315"] [BlackElo "1217"] [EndDate "2010.11.26"] [WhiteRating "1315"] [BlackRating "1217"] [GameId "7945197"] 1. e4 d5 2. exd5 Qxd5 3. Nc3 Qd8 { If you really need to play the Scandinavian, th idea unless you find yourself in a very familiar opening system.

4. n-c6 seemed fine at least for the moment. The "pin" is not a problem as seen in the game. after 5d5, n-b46. b-c4 c6 and black seems fine. 13. g6 was actually quite strong- hopefully he sees the idea of the liberating f6 and e5(with discovered attack on the queen)

14 f5 won a piece...nothing wrong with that

Just gave it a quick run through before going to bed.
Noticed your back rank trap failed as White can just take the Bishop.

Black has just played 36.B(d3)-b5.

Originally posted by erikido
4. n-c6 seemed fine at least for the moment. The "pin" is not a problem as seen in the game. after 5d5, n-b46. b-c4 c6 and black seems fine. 13. g6 was actually quite strong- hopefully he sees the idea of the liberating f6 and e5(with discovered attack on the queen)

Crafty agrees with you about move 13, although it considers both defenses playable. Still, ...g6 looks like a bad move to have to make.

I just plum wasn't paying attention on ...f5. That was a sound move. Edited my PGN.

1... d5
2... Qxd5
3... Qd8?

Good Gosh man, play chess, don't get pushed around. Marshall Gambit if you must play the Scandinavian!!!!

A few comments that I haven't seen yet from the others:

Hi Mad Rook.

A wonderful instructive find. I stopped after I saw the flaw in the trap.
I never even considered the follow up. Oh the sweetness of it all.
White HAS to take the Bishop else he is lost! Brilliant.


White can take the Bishop and answer Rd1+ with Qf1 and the ending
is a very simple, but instructive to a novice, win based on the outside
passed pawns.

White played 37.Qa1? and yes 37...Be2 does indeed do the trick.


Super stuff. Oh Kerboucher how did you let that one slip after spotting
the original back rank trick?

You could knock up a good book of instructive postions played by the
under 1400 players on here. Stuff you would not get from any GM games
and yet so very educational and enlightening.

Try pushing that book on the game snobs that believe only GM's can produce
the instructive stuff. Some fo the games on here are pure gold.

So much for using a box to help you study tactics. This cracking position hiding
these wonderful ideas would never be seen by a user, the box would
simply not let the user see it. And yet it was played by humans.

Get in there and dig them out for yourselves and stop kidding yourselves
that these things can show you anything of any value for OTB play v a human.

Mad One, you are the guy with all the boxes, any on a reasonable level,
(else what is the point) go for 36...Bb5.
I know it found Be2 but what about the piece of unsound human creativity
that lead to it. This is where it is at.

A Great inspiring thread. (I love a good cheapo it makes my day.)

If you are under 1600 and have not learned anything from the last two posts
then give up.

Brilliant stuff, MadRook and GP.

Originally posted by greenpawn34
Mad One, you are the guy with all the boxes, any on a reasonable level,
(else what is the point) go for 36...Bb5.
I know it found Be2 but what about the piece of unsound human creativity
that lead to it. This is where it is at.

Hi GP,
As you well know, the engines (boxes) mostly just crunch the numbers. All 36th moves for Black are losing, of course. I think it's a very close call between Bb5 and Be4 (sometimes Bb1 slips in). Most of the engines slightly prefer Be4.

I think there may be a hash table effect going on here. Often a box will prefer Bb5 when I have it analyze with only one principal variation (pv), but when I set it on a multi-pv setting like 7 pv lines, it will then decide it prefers Be4.

Anyway, with just a quick spot check of some engines I have on my PC, the ones that tended to lock onto Bb5 were:
AnMon 5.66 (it stands for Angel - Monster, haha)
Arasan 11.4
Crafty 23.4
Glass 1.5
Your old buddy, Gromit 3.8.2 (oddly, Gromit 3.0 preferred Be4)
Hermann 2.4
and Spike 1.2

Stockfish 1.9 (with Gaviota tablebases) and Glaurung 1.2.1 tended to alternate between Be4 and Bb5, ultimately settling on Be4.

Pro Deo let me down; It preferred Be4, even on the Tal personality settings. 🙁

Thanks all for the comments! I have recently downloaded Winboard 4.4.4. How can I upload a PGN into this, or another program that is more user friendly?

Once again thanks all!

Originally posted by kerbouchard1100
Thanks all for the comments! I have recently downloaded Winboard 4.4.4. How can I upload a PGN into this, or another program that is more user friendly?

Once again thanks all!

Hi kerbouchard,

I'm not a fan of using Winboard for handling pgn files.

You might try Arena 2.0.1 (there's also a new beta version 2.5, but with a few more bugs), Scid, or ChessPad.

I haven't used ChessPad, but it looks like a fairly simple and low footprint program.

Scid is good, but the features/configuration can be overwhelming. (The tutorial isn't finished, either.) Also, remember that you can only view pgn files (It opens them as read-only). If you want to edit a game file, you first have to convert the pgn database to scid file format. You can export a Scid file back to pgn, but that's an extra step, of course.

Arena is good for viewing and analyzing games. The only major glitch I noticed was that if I added annotations to a pgn file, the next time I loaded that file, the annotations wouldn't be viewable. The annotations were still in the pgn file, but you just couldn't see them with the Arena GUI. No idea whether it's an Arena bug or incompatibility with my hardware/software. I haven't tried the new beta version to see if the problem is still there.

If you go to the link below, you'll find links to the GUIs I mentioned above.
http://freechess.50webs.com/guis.html