The Nova Scotia Open was the first classical tournament I had played for a while, and I was very happy with the result! In this 5-part series, I’ll walk through each of my games, the lessons learned, and at the end, the tournament results! (spoiler)
Kudos to my coworker Michael who helped me to analyze the games 🙏
Alrighty, let’s jump into round 1. My section was for rating levels between 1300 and 1600 CFC. My CFC rating before the tournament was 1503, so I was hoping to have some good games. Some people definitely play a lot stronger than their ratings in these events, though, so let’s see.
I’m generally pretty comfortable with the Vienna game. This is a typical position that I get after the following move order, and I know it quite well:
Continuing on…
So far, all pretty typical ideas from the Vienna. Pushing f4 early is thematic, and normally I would put my knight on f3 and castle kingside, potentially opening the f-file at some point for my rook.
My next move, however, was a bit of a miss:
The right move was fxe5 first, winning a pawn with tempo on the knight. Honestly, I’m not really sure why I didn’t play that. I think I was “seeing ghosts”, thinking that black had something after …Ng4 and maybe …Bc5. But it’s actually perfectly fine for white if I put the knight on f3 and push my pawn to d4 if needed:
As it turns out, this is the position that we ended up in anyway:
My opponent and I both missed that after 8. exd5 black could play 8…Nxd5 and then the threat of 9…Qh4+ would prevent me from taking the pawn on e5:
However, despite my mistake, I ended up with a very nice position. And once black castled, I found a nice little trick to open up their king:
At this point I have a good position, but there is still some danger, and not an immediately clear win. For one thing, black’s dark-squared bishop is putting pressure on my backward d-pawn, and x-raying my king.
And if black could somehow get their king to h8 and the rook to g8 then I would be facing some pressure.
I decided that I needed to keep pressure on black’s king, and get some more pieces over to the kingside for an attack. But I had to do so in a way that didn’t allow black to take the pawn on d4 unless I was ready for it.
At this point, black’s queen took her eye off the f6 square, and I felt that I had a strong attack!
But the question is, how to continue from here? My first thought is lifting the rook to f3 in order to bring it to the g-file with Rg3. It would also remove any threat of black sacrificing the bishop on h3 to open up my king. However, after moving my queen, I don’t have a defender for the d-pawn anymore. I was calculating a line like this:
This is still completely winning for white, but I was trying hard to find some sort of forced checkmate sequence. Anyway, I didn’t find it, so I went ahead with the rook lift. My opponent didn’t play what I expected, but I was able to continue pressing into my better position.
At this point my opponent resigned. There was too much pressure, they were down material, and they were about to lose more. I could bring my second rook to the f-file and add more firepower to the attack. There wasn’t much they could do. A nice first win to kick off my tournament!
Stay tuned for round 2 coming soon!
Key Moments
- On move 8 I should have taken with the f-pawn first, winning a pawn and gaining a tempo on the knight. I was a bit concerned about counter-play, but I should have realized that it was ok.