Playing through your old games

 Playing through your old games 


Playing through your old games can be quite eye-opening. Did I really make that move?


Paul Raynes was kind enough to send me a database of my games, many of which I had forgotten about. It bought back some memories, some good some bad.


The following position caught my eye:




It's interesting that the engine says that White can go Nd1 here.

From memory, this wasn't a move that I even considered in the game. The idea is to redeploy the Knight to d3, via f2. You then play c3, Bc2, and at the same time Black will struggle to find a useful plan (... e5 will weaken the d5 square, whereas ... d5 will just be met by e5.)

Eventually in the game I did play Ne2, which was another way to reroute the Knight.

But if I could identify a weakness in my game, it was my inability to find plans and identify enough candidate moves. This still carries on to this day. Perhaps through laziness, perhaps because I didn't train hard enough when I was younger, my weakness has always been the failure to look at a chess game in a deeper way. 





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