Nova Daily - 14 April 2025

Hi!

It remains a common phenomenon among writers: what to write about this time? It often happens that you have an idea, write a text about it, then get a related idea, and before you know it you've written several texts about the same subject. It's beginning to feel a bit stale, and within several entries you feel like you've exhausted the topic. You don't want to write yet another entry about Kasparov (Happy belated), the World Championship (congrats Ju Wenjun on 6-2) or Harry Potter, and you're left with no inspiration.

I've written material on what I typically do in such a situation in several of my older blogs. There are more writing tips out there, and what I did is to just sit still with a notepad at the ready. From the first thing that popped up in my head I followed the train of thought for exactly 10 minutes. It started with a simple topic that I already wanted to write about, and along the way, as I tried to have my writing keep up with my thoughts, I was able to solidify a total of 28 different topics within 10 minutes. Now worked out properly, these topics are:

1. The chess scene from Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
2. Jeremy Silman who composed the game's position
3. A book review on Silman's The Amateur's Mind
4. Imbalances in a game of chess
5. Mauricio Flores Ríos has written a new book on imbalances that I'm waiting to arrive at my doorstep
6. Ron's sacrifice in the chess scene
7. Chess in media: The Queen's Gambit chess game with Borgov
8. Chess as a topic in non-chess literature
9. The Chess Revolution by Peter Doggers
10. Cheating in chess, and GMs that were caught cheating
11. The subject of cheating as covered in chess literature, such as Sunrise in the Bronx and Winning the World Open
12. Thoughts about giving people a second chance yes/no
13. Other second chances: comebacks in lost games and David Smerdon's The Complete Swindler
14. Grinding lost games
15. Grind Like a Grandmaster by Magnus Carlsen and David Howell
16. Freestyle Chess and Hans Niemann's withdrawal from the Paris tournament
17. My opinions on Niemann
18. Niemann vs Dina Belenkaya on YouTube
19. My opinion on the Botez Invitational tournament of 2024
20. Good and bad streamers: how can you tell?
21. Pointers on what to do and what not to do during chess commentary
22. My thoughts on Anish Giri
23. Chess rows on Twitter
24. Vladimir Kramnik and his beef with Jose Martinez
25. My thoughts on accusations
26. Heroes who have tumbled off their pedestals
27. Bobby Fischer
28. Spassky and being a gentle person in chess

It's admittedly not the happiest list of topics. That might not come as a big surprise: there is a lot within the world of chess that I'm really concerned about. Cheating is a hot topic at the moment, and it's important to deal with it in an appropriate way.

Concern

I'm not going to write about each of the 28 topics I pointed out above. Some of these topics don't really deserve my attention. The list of people I don't like is rather extensive, and should I really roast everyone that I despise? That's not what my blog is about. I have nicer and more positive subjects to write about than the comment sections on YouTube and Twitter.

The quality of a lot of chess content (or lack thereof) is another issue that I'm often thinking about. It's hard to discuss this issue without pointing fingers and sounding like a crabbed and resentful hater. I understand that attention is an amoral phenomenon and that what gains attention has power. I don't see it as my job to morally educate anyone but myself. Still, these matters are dear to me, and with my writing I hope to at absolute minimum be able to structure and verbalise my thoughts and feelings. If by doing so I manage to communicate something that a reader finds thought-provoking, that'd be nice. But to the extent that I actively want to contribute to the overall public discourse within these Daily blogs, I hope to be able to write at least original text of decent quality.

I'm glad to read within my thoughts that there are a lot of books that cross my mind within such a brainstorm session. Chess books are the source of chess information that I love by far the most.

The game

Today's game was entertaining. I think that I got an advantage from the start. I got a bit sloppy with my advantage later on, but my opponent was in time-trouble and walked into a nasty trick.

My thoughts:

Model games:

This is the moment to get to grips with this sideline. 8.Nc3 isn't the move Ntirlis suggested. 8.Nbd2 is the right continuation here. During the game I felt that my knight was misplaced on c3; how much better would my game have been if the knight had been on d2 for the entire time! ...a5 would never have been a threat because I could've done Nb3, the pressure against the c-file would have been immediate after doubling rooks, the threat of doubling up pawns on c3 wouldn't exist. I'll include two games; one in which black traded on b3 and one where black didn't.

The analysis:

All in all a much more chaotic game than it needed to be. I got myself into much more trouble than I should've.

What can I take away from this game?

1. The main point about the opening is that I should play 8.Nbd2. The knight is much better positioned on d2 than it is on c3 for a variety of reasons. It keeps the c-file open, it doesn't allow black to resolve the tension and make the structure symmetrical, and with the pawn on c6 typically all of the knight's advance squares are unavailable. This can well be compared with the Tartakower Caro-Kann in which 6.Nf3 is inferior to a development scheme involving Ng1-e2. This is stuff that I know, but I wasn't aware that it also applies here.
2. Moving in too quickly with b2-b4 could make the pawn a target. In the game black managed to tear open the a-file precisely because of this move.
3. After I had won a pawn, I would've been well advised to swap off one pair of rooks.
4. The move 19.f4 would've been very strong. The point to keep in mind is that e6-e5 isn't a move that black can play lightly as it'd isolate the d-pawn and allow Bg2 to become a monster. So it's a free gain of time and space. Just a bit of matter to it and it's a universe of its own.
5. Keep an eye out for inconvenient tactics! 40...Kd6 would've been rather unfortunate.
6. Calculation is quite important. 42...Rxb5 would've kept the balance.
7. Trading down into the pawn endgame was completely right.