i love when ILX gets all chessed out (ILX hot chess action is here)

like i mentioned i've barely been playing longer formats in lieu of bullet games (and watching lots of youtube chess) and i got nervous that it would hurt my long format rating when i finally got back to it but i played 3 games today and yesterday and won them all including beating the highest rated person i've ever beaten (a 1709). so close to breaking 1700 now in Blitz. why am i sharing this? first bc i'm now convinced that playing bullet really does help yr longer time format game, and second bc i'm also now convinced that watching lots of chess makes you better even if you're not consistently every day playing 10m games (or longer). nb that i do intend to get back into longer games.

this game was fun! Stockfish charges me with two blunders but I am proud of how well I exploited black's poor development and of this big oopsie they made https://lichess.org/BHdmRMP5/white#24

The king’s gambit is my sh1t right now

gotta be one of my better attacks https://lichess.org/hVnLEha8Li8p

I like how white's 14. Nxc6? ends up with your 17. …Bb4! and white is totally discomposed by it.

felt good man

very elegant at the end there

thank you kindly

I'm up a bishop in a Q+B vs Q endgame but I can't work out how to win. Frustrating!

i mean without knowing the pawn situation idk how to help you there

sounds like a draw tho w the queens one never know what u cn get up to

Play for blood, sunday

this is the current position. seems tough to find a win but i'm gonna shuffle the pieces around for a while and hope he blunders lol

pic.twitter.com/1loNwAMldc

— Jeremy Steel (@jeremysteel) April 2, 2020

Bf8

there's no win, be the gent and offer a draw imo

qf6+ is the best draw offer obv

imo you are winning here but i don't have a solution (and i'm not sure i should give it to you if i came up with one). my advice is to get an advantageous position through zugzwang - right now the movements opponent can make are limited. you don't need forcing checkmate - just small improvements and force him to move into a bad position. i don't like Bf8 bc Qf7 gives him initiative and room to breath but maybe look at Bf6? Qg1+ is a resource to use at the right time too i think.

actually i think Bf8 just loses the bishop after Qf7 king can't save the bishop

Ugh
Yeah

we bumped elbows and called it a draw

https://www.chess.com/daily/game/256531586

you went for the second best draw offer ;)

i go through extended periods where i cant be bothered to concentrate, chess is a journey of self discovery

it even quantifies the difference between focused and unfocused phases, which is roughly 50 elo points lol

sometimes i just like to move the pieces and see what happens.

da pieces move nice

I love beating suqqas three times in a row

My b1tch is on the run

don't hurt 'em calstars!

A little unnerving when My opponents avatar is a close up of her face giving me an aggressive staredown

But hey, I’m up in material so

Poor bishop’s fatal flaw: he can never cross the tracks

I've been trying to learn how to play the sicilian. its so hard to remember all those moves - and then people do the wrong moves and you cant remember how to punish them. but still. you do get some fun games.

i play da siciliano feel like rather than try to remember all the moves just pick a line u like and play it a bunch and youll get the hang of it, i recently compared what id been doing to theory and it pretty much made sense tho it wasnt the primary line for the variation i was playing but it was a known playable one

its the khan w queens knight on d7 where the main line has it on c6

apparently joe biden and bernie sanders both play chess

yes we caro-kann

Fianchetto Fidelio

This is an amazing blitz match between Carlsen and Firouzja

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJtyQLkmRsU

I love playing unrated players - never know until you do if they’re pros or schlubs

usually scrubs tho

love a surprise though

Anyone following the Magnus Carlsen Invitational? Its the final between Magnus and Hikaru in half an hour.

https://chess24.com/en/watch/live-tournaments/magnus-carlsen-invitational-2020-final-4/2/1/1

he got blood from a stone with that win there

Yeah. He's a genius at endgames.

yeah magnus signature is prob winning seemingly drawn games, kinda lame signature! no offense

there's a video where he takes bartholomew's end games you must know test and he says he never explicitly studied them and claims endgame is sorta a weakness for him iirc but then dominates the test either by knowing all the endgames or more bc he's able to somehow calculate a bunch of them on the fly and comes up with some solutions that aren't the given ones by the bartholomew program it's a cool thing to watch tbh

yeah i watched that its pretty nuts bartholomews all do you know the blhdy blah formulation and magnus is all no whats that and bartholomew starts to explain it and magnus is like yeah thats just obvious

btw i hate this thread title what do u guys think about changing it to "ilx chess club"

i don't mind either way what the thread is called.

i should work more on my endgames. the cool thing about being great at endgames is that a) at my level i've noticed a lot of ppl aren't great at them so it'll give me a huge leg up and b) a critical strategy when going up a piece or a few pawns is knowing how to crush the endgame with that advantage but if you don't really know it v well it's too easy to still make stupid blunders even in totally winnable end games.

I don't mind the thread title, and recognize it as a nod to the Yes thread, but I'm not married to it.