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One of the most important priorities in a game of chess is the safety of the king. The win condition of chess is checkmate. And checkmate, is fundamentally an unstoppable attack on the king, regardless of all other factors – such as material loss, the strength of your position, and how close you are to checkmating the opponent yourself. This is why we always need to be careful about the defences around our king. Everybody who has played chess for a while will have blundered a move that resulted in a mate in 2 or even mate in 1 accidentally!

In today’s video, I’m going to talk about a short game I played yesterday where I took advantage of a weakness in the opponent’s position, and the bias where we can get blinded due to our aversion to material loss.

One of the learnings that I got when analysing this game is that simple tactics like lining up a bishop and a queen for a mating attack are powerful, and sometimes underestimated when a position is seemingly defended. Knights are also a tricky piece for setting traps as their moves are less straightforward to visualise.

Game on chess.com: https://www.chess.com/game/live/31363784541

[Event "Live Chess"]
[Site "Chess.com"]
[Date "2021.11.22"]
[Round "?"]
[White "JChristina22"]
[Black "vitualis"]
[Result "0-1"]
[ECO "D02"]
[WhiteElo "1225"]
[BlackElo "1219"]
[TimeControl "1800"]
[EndTime "16:02:19 PST"]
[Termination "vitualis won by checkmate"]

1. Nf3 d5 2. d4 Nc6 3. g3 Nf6 4. Nc3 Bf5 5. Bg2 e6 6. O-O Bd6 7. Bg5 h6 8. Be3 Ng4 9. Qc1 O-O 10. h3 Nxe3 11. Qxe3 Qf6 12. g4 Bxc2 13. Qd2 Qf4 14. Qxc2 Nxd4 15. Qd3 Nxf3+ 16. Qxf3 Qh2# 0-1