Last Tuesday, I played two games against Pete Rankin in the club rapidplay, both of which I won. In this post I’ll look at the first game, where I was White.
The game initially developed very much in my favour, as my opponent took play into what looked like an inferior version of the Queen’s Indian. At first, I played incisively to gain a definite advantage, but then I started to drift. Eventually, both players started to run short of time; combined with the fact that the increment was only five seconds, this made it very hard to play accurately. I decided on a speculative piece sacrifice, which succeed due to the difficulties of defending under the circumstances.
I give the game below with some notes.