Aim Here

Between the gun-running, whalefucking, drugs, dubiously-aged floozies, and suspected murder rap and generally extravagant sleazebucketry, I always thought John Mcafee was the type of guy to die in a last stand Scarface-style shootout with Latin American Drug Cops. It seems a bit anticlimactic for him to quietly conk out using a prison bedsheet.

Division C Round 20 AimHere checkmates DieHardDoonhamer, after the inevitable Scandinavian Defence queenhunt.

We should be more proactive. Scotland should play the long game and start a program of sending out it's fecund young females to the world centres of association football as part of a breeding program to increase the quantities of decent strikers with Scottish grannies. We won't see results immediately, but in 60 years time, we'll start to see the dividends pay off. Sturgeon, get on it!

She's dead, Jim

At the risk of causing GordonS even more anguish in a short space of time, are you sure that he's played 18 games? At the end of Round 18, everybody should have played at most 16 or 17, since we only play 10 games in rounds 1-11, and we only play 6 or 7 in the next 7 rounds. Also I reckon this phantom game was a win, since he lost his game against me in Round 18 and I was 3 points clear of him before then.

Heh, I was annoyed at that. I was expecting you to scurry the queen away first and let me be the guy initiating the rook swap, so I could castle in peace, but you beat me to it! Nah. Just downloaded the .pgn to my local drive (I keep them around to analyse locally, since chess.com restricts me to one per day and someday I intend to script up something in python that goes through them all and tells me what moves I blunder most in) but since scid doesn't like chess960 and I didn't see a bright green 'analysis' button on chess.com when the game ended, I used the lichess game import function to get me the analysis.

I thought it was a bit closer than that. I don't think I sussed the right opening moves for this particular setup, and your queen was aimed at the e2 pawn for most of the game, which that caused me a fair amount of anguish , especially after you broke open my kingside with the knight that fell into the fork. Lichess seems to think you had 3 inaccuracies and a blunder (the pawn fork) compared to my 3 inaccuracies. As for 'traps', a lot of those were perfectly good threats that did a decent job of keeping me bottled in for a while, stopping me castling for fear of Qxe2 and having to keep an eye out for the mate threats in the backdoor. I never expect "traps" to work - I prefer to make threats that force the other guy to work around them in ways that help me win. If the opponent blunders a trap, it's a pleasant surprise.

By my reckoning, he is.

It was taking the g7 pawn that was the mistake (Rg8 causes a world of pain no matter what you do), but it looks like such a natural, harmless followup to swiping f7 that I'd expect most of us seaside leaguers to take it. The engine is decidedly lukewarm on that whole sequence, which is annoying. I channel my inner Mikhail Tal and see what I think is a swashbuckling game-winning sacrifice from about 5 or 6 moves away (it was a factor in why I castled queenside) and the after-match game analysis board tells me "ackchewally, I think you'll find you were just making a big lucky mistake from move 11 onwards". Git!

Division C, Round 17 AimHere prises markf268's king out of his hideyhole with a rook sacrifice and wins by checkmate.

Good point. I just had a brainfart. Either way, it didn't look like the best move on the board, which is the main thing. As for you not knowing the more newbie-centric e4 opening names, isn't that primarily to do with you being Division C's primary exponent of the d4 game. I'm a bit hazy as to what anything beyond 'London System' and 'Queens Gambit Declined' even is. I know there's a world of fancy stuff with names mostly of the form Kings/Queens/Nimzo Indian Attack/Defence (delete as applicable) but it's all a murky world of scary stuff I know little about. I'm still not wholly convinced that the Queen's Gambit Accepted is even a thing.

Yeah, I spotted the checkmate trap you lined up - I had a brief phase of trying the Traxler countergambit (another fierce anti-fried liver tactic, except it involves a bishop sacrificing itself on f2) and so I know the drill - if it looks like the bad guy's wise to the queen/rook fork, you check with the bishop instead, force that king to block the queen, and then leg it with your stolen f7 pawn. Edit: Come to think of it, if I take the knight, you do more than recover, you win a piece by pawn-forking the knight and bishop.

Division C, Round 17 GordonS496 mishandles some early fried-liver style aggression and calls it a day on move 17. AimHere beats GordonS496 by resignation.

There were ways of preventing the fork without losing material, such as moving the light-squared bishop to cover the square. The computer's best move allows Bxh6, and threatens Qxf8 mate, and I expect at the very least you win both black knights for a rook.