Double My Egg Nog (single serving) results

I now present the results from the first (and only) round of the chess blogger Double My Egg Nog tourney, as Annotated Games 80 and 81.  The tournament unfortunately was cut short due to real-life issues faced by some of the players.  The first game against Rocky Rook you can also check out from his perspective.  Early on, I could have obtained a better opening by switching to a Stonewall structure, but essentially I was doing OK against Rocky's Colle System until the miscalculation with 19...Ne4 which forcibly loses a pawn.  (An eerily similar mistake was documented in Annotated Game #78).  A much more tactical game then results, as I try to gain compensation for the pawn; in fact, I miss a winning tactic with a deflection/back-rank theme on move 24.  After some ups and downs, I could have in the end held the draw a pawn down, but was over-optimistic about trapping White's rook, which threatens to wreak devastation on Black's pawns instead and I resign.

In the second game, Robert Pearson tries to avoid my known openings with 1. Nc3!? but nonetheless ends up in a structure very similar to a Caro-Kann, which I felt comfortable enough playing.  Some of the opening problems posed were different, however, and I was able to identify some key improvements for my play during analysis.  After both sides castle queenside, the fireworks start when Robert speculatively offers a pawn sacrifice on move 13, which I eventually end up taking on move 15.  White then had a possible sequence to get to an equal but unbalanced material situation (queen vs. two rooks) but opted to play more conventionally.  However, White's next moves essentially help Black shift his pieces into better positions and then launch his own attack on White's more exposed king.  The threatened rook sacrifice by White on the a-file would have led to mate, but he never had the chance to carry out the threat, as Black crashed through and chased the king into a mating net.  A fun and dynamic game.

Annotated Game #80

Annotated Game #81