Defense against the Queen Blitz??

Dear Chessmates,

After years of undisciplined play I've been trying to elevate my game by studying classic openings and paying particular attention to pawn development. However, I frequently play friends whose favorite tactics are to attack early and relentlessly with queen and bishop, usually frustrating my attempts at structural development and longer-term objectives. I find this annoying not only becasue it is considered an "amateurish" tactic, but also because they are very good at it and have shown it to be effective. I want to elevate the level of play in the game and want to know how best to make them pay for choosing the early Queen. Advice welcome.

EL in SJ

I would love to be of some assistance. When your opponent develops the queen early, the idea is that you can develop your pieces and attack the queen at the same time.

The best is to try and play it yourself against rybka. Computers are awsome at these kinds of stuff. 

If you can show an example game, that would help a lot. Most likely your games are being decided by overlooking tactics.

Loomis,

Thanks for your interest. In the following game, my opponent plays as black and counter attacks successfully against white, winning the white queen with a clever pin of the f2 pawn. How can I best defend against a queen in my face from an aggressive opponent like this?

EL in SJ

Well, you have done pretty good until the last move. You were up a piece, and exchanging queens would be just perfect in that situation. It should be your opponent who avoids exchanging down.

I think looking at a few Qh4, Qa5 and Qf6 type of moves that might come up in your openings might help. You should have an eye for kicking the queen away with tempo, in almost every early queen move, the other side has a chance to do that. In this game, Bf4 does that very effectively.

The rest of your problem seems to be about general tactics, and don't worry, we all have that problem, just study tactics everyday and you'll be fine. 

I think instead of Nd2 ---> Just exchanging Queens would have been a good idea, or 0-0 would have been better...

11) Qb3 looks good at a quick glance...

The last two posters said it, but I'll say it again. You're winning in that game and make a blunder with Nd2. You lost because you overlooked a tactic, not because you have a hard time handling an agressive queen in your face. In fact, you handled the premature queen agression just fine.

The queen creates a lot of threats and a lot of tactics. What you're probably experiencing is that you overlook a tactic in your games. My advice would be to practice tactics. You can do tactics puzzles, plus in each game go over it carefully to find all the tactics for both sides, then go over it with a computer to really find all the tactics.

thanks everybody who commented... good advice vs. killer Queen. FYI, here's how it turned out. Goes to show it aint never over till its over.

[EL]

Nice recovery, the fact that he did his BEST moves possible, shows clearly that you outsmarted him and made some genius moves.

But yes, u should have saved your queen tho to avoid such situations.

and i woulda gotten away with it if it weren't for you meddling kids! (to be pronounced like a scooby doo villain)

--scaplener

p.s. that and the fact that i totally pulled some rookie moves against a superior player

I know this is old but just felt the need to post, this is an example of my biggest problem incurred in my first 20 matches(started playing 2 weeks ago. I've read some about openings and an early queen attack isn't talked about much. Great recovery and it has helped me immensely. Thanks to the poster and all replies

Wow, five years since I wrote that.. and 11,000 hits so far on this thread. I love this chess site. Anyway, I've learned a thing or two since then and found all the advice given here to be true. Check out this recent game where my 1400+ opponent recaptures to his disadvantage: