🔥 Chessnut GO travels | Motorcycling & Chess @ Sydney Fish Markets! 🏍️♟️🦐🤩
#chessnutgo #travelchess #chessvideos #viennagambit
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The Sydney Fish Markets is one of my favourite places to visit. Getting some freshly shucked oysters and a hot dish of a live pipis or a lobster with a glass of wine is close to a perfect meal! One of my favourite places to visit at the Fish Markets is the lovely seafood restaurant, The Boatshed Pyrmont, which took over the location from the former seafood institution, Doyles (which unfortunately, didn't survive the pandemic and the loss of the tourist trade).
I've been visiting The Boatshed since they opened. I love the atmosphere and they've always been very accommodating of me playing chess inside, even with a tournament sized board! So, today was a perfect Sydney day, rather chilly but sunny, to ride over with my motorcycle and Chessnut GO board! 🤩
Note: watch the motorcycling focussed video (at the bottom of the article) of today's outing to chillax! 😌
Like my trip to Kurnell, I found myself having a run of losses against live opponents. In my defence, it is quite distracting playing while monitoring the camera! 😅 I had a pretty good game that I thought I could use; I'd found a clever and forcing tactic winning material, but I ruined it by blindly hanging a piece that was obviously under attack. One of the things that I push myself to do with creating these videos and articles is that I want my games to be "pretty"!
So to not overstay my welcome at The Boatshed, I played a game against one of the the intermediate chess.com bots, Maria.
Maria is programmed to play in an aggressive and attacking manner and as such, she accepted the Vienna Gambit (1. e4 e5 2. Nc3 Nf6 3. f4 exf4?!) - let's go! She made her first weird move on move 5 with (5... g6?!). I don't think that I've ever seen this response to the Vienna Gambit Accepted lines before, so I thought about it a bit. I wondered - is this some sort of trap programmed into the bot, or, just evidence of the bot "breaking". I eventually decided on the latter. One of the interesting things about beginner and intermediate rated bots is that they often don't do very well against the Vienna Game and the Vienna Gambit!
I played the tactical ideas in the Vienna Gambit Accepted - develop the king's knight to f3 to neutralise the possibility of Qh4+, take the centre with pawns, and then set up an attack on Black's weak f7-pawn and to attack down the semi-open f-file!
On move 11, Maria played (11... Qe7?). This puts the queen in front of her king on a fully open e-file. Tactically, this must be a mistake (and it was: Stockfish gives an evaluation of almost [+6]!) as the queen is at risk of being pinned! Black could still potentially block such a pin with their pieces - either their light square bishop or c6-knight - and I spent some time thinking this through. I found the correct move, (12. d5!). And a few moves later after some trades, I make the pin with (15. Re1!).
After this it was a matter of mopping up. I still needed to be careful as I traded a rook and bishop for Black's queen, meaning that Black had a numerical piece majority (rook pair, bishop and knight; vs my rook, queen and bishop). However, the queen is just too powerful and Black's defences and material quickly fell. Black's king was rather slippery and I didn't find a quick elegant mate. Nonetheless, checkmate was inevitable. The tip is to give a check every turn, and to double-/triple-check that there isn't a stalemate when making any move that doesn't give check (e.g., to avoid repetition).
Game: https://www.chess.com/analysis/game/computer/131614869
Motorcycling | To nowhere in particular...
