(K)Night Shift: SCC July Tornado Round 4

It was a dark and stormy night. However, it wasn't a dark and stormy knight. My opponent Revant had the white pieces, so it was a light and storming knight. Speaking of which the knight was very special, and capable of working night shifts (During the day I could see its tricks). It was so smart that it went from e2 to d2 without either of us noticing it! Indeed, it made a move which must be give "!!!!" because the computer didn't see it (Possibly because the move was illegal).

Because of the virus forcing you to read this blog, (See The rar attack), you won't be able to put it down. So luckily you don't have to be entertained, you will have to read this garbage.

Speaking of garbage, that is what my opening systems seem to be these days. I prepare my new novelty, go out and play it confidently against RookSacrifice or anshulcgm2, only to be quickly rebuffed. Here's an example of my opening being refuted within 5 moves:

This happens so much. Distressed, I tried many different openings. Dutch, Grunfeld, King's Indian, in each one they found a way to claim a large advantage. So now I can't play a single opening since I will only see the flaws in it. 

But going back to my agme, I wasn't able to stand against the knight rebel. It simply broke the rules and made sure that no one knew about it.

I had a 2-0 score against Revant going into this game, but he was ready to checkmate me with the opposite side castling. First my attack failed, than his, and then the evil knight came.

Somewhere between the 11th and 20th moves Revant adjusted his knight to d2 from e2. I'm 90% sure he didn't realize where the knight actually was, but that means he cheated without even knowing it! Bad luck for me. I looked at Stockfish and it didn't see Nb3!!, because it was highly illegal. 

Anyways, I didn't see that his move was illegal until after the game, so I couldn't do anything about it. As it was, he blew a superior position due to his knight shift and gave me an advantage, but time pressure led to my loss. Here is the remainder of the game, starting after the brilliancy Nb3!!

I learned a few things from this game:

1. It turns out that you don't have to be a scholastic player to make illegal moves! It's interesting how I didn't notice his knight shift.

2. Keep in mind of the opponent's threats. I think I have been taking Silman's advice of pushing your own adjenda to the extreme. I completely missed Qa5, something that usually I should see even in time pressure.

3. Don't notate when under 5 minutes. That costed some precious time. Of course I wanted the game, but I would rather win and lose my notation than lose and have it!

4. Time management is incredibly improtant. Like Round 2, I didn't have a good process of thinking, and pretty much jumped from move to move, missing a bunch of good moves. I tried to fix it, and almost did for a couple of my rounds in the Seafair.

5. Expect that your opponent's moves are bad. After ever one of my opponent's pawn pushes, from moves 18-23, I thought a lot and lost confidence, even though they weren't that strong. I should have been more confident. Of course that eating problem also killed my play. 

I might try to post a bunch of blogs about the Seattle Seafair in the coming weeks before I go to the Washington International. Of course all of you have searched me up in the uschess.org database player search and you know what happenned, but I'll do my best to keep it a mystery. Even I'll try to forget what happenned, and I'll probably do it successfully!