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https://chesstempo.com/
They also have a huge free database of past games. I've been studying some of Paul Morphy's old games, the Bobby Fischer of his day. Honestly, Morphy was an absolute genius. An estimated rating of over 2650 midway through the 19th century!!
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I had to post this one.
I was outplayed in the opening and the middlegame, going down a full seven points in material. Almost all players would have resigned at this point because winning looked hopeless. I was fighting a pair of rooks with just a knight. Due to sloppy play by my opponent (which often happens when one player is at a serious material advantage) I was able to force two pawns to the seventh rank and would have queened twice, but at this point my opponent duly resigned.
The engine had me at a plus 8.5 advantage when my opponent resigned, which is pretty amazing given that he was still seven points up in material.
I fought tooth and nail for this one.
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Great tussle Nom
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Thanks Dee. I had a few games like that yesterday, where I was blatantly losing but somehow managed to pull off a victory. The one above was the best though, because I was in an absolutely hopeless position. Even drawing should have taken a miracle.
Have a look at this nice little checkmate I forced earlier. I sacrificed a knight on g5 to get in a quick Kingside attack which paid huge dividends.
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All this playing I'm doing is really paying off. I think I might be somewhere around 2000 ELO, which I'm extremely pleased about.
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I just scored win number 8 of the evening on Lichess, and had a really tough game. My opponent had me under pressure for the entire match before I finally broke through. It's absolutely amazing what you miss during a game though. I thought my opponent was playing really solidly, but the analysis showed he left a pawn hanging just after the opening, and then hung a full rook later on, both of which I missed. He should have exchanged bishops on h4 too, on move 13, to stop me castling. I saw that in the game and breathed a sigh of relief. Castling saved me from his attack later on.
I played the queen's gambit in this one, which I don't usually play because it's too popular and I'm not a big fan of learning a ton of theory. My opponent met with the Slav defence (c6).
I thought I was being clever by playing queen to e4 on move 31, forking the king and the knight, but it was a mistake. Turns out my opponent could have just played knight to g6, knight to f5, or even queen to f5. Luckily, he missed all of these moves because he was still reeling about losing his rook.
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The drawback is that engine use is not really prohibited, and while players in the <2100 bracket more often than not play themselves, the higher you climb, the more likely you are to play against a human-engine hybrid. Nothing wrong with that, but if it is not your cup of tea, you will be better served playing on chess.com or lichess. On GameKnot, if you really want it, you can just have Stockfish alone get you to 2300 or so without any input from you.
Correspondence/offline chess can really-really improve your game, but you have to be serious about it. It is very tempting, when you have 10+ games simultaneously going, to postpone your moves to the last moment, and then just blitz them out: in that case you will not learn much. It is probably more sensible to play no more than 5-6 games at the same time and look at each every single day for a couple of minutes, at least, making sure that your brain is continuously analyzing something.
Chess.com specifically features a lot of tournaments that start with a specific position. If you enter a tourney on King's Gambit which you never play in regular games, then you will have to think from the first principles from the get go, and that arguably is the best way to grow as a chess player.
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I've been learning the main queen's gambit declined line and trying to transition it into an attack plan used by Carlsen. Typically, before I'd learned the line it came out in about eight games on the bounce, but tonight I've had it just once in eleven games, and I couldn't get it all the way out because my opponent attacked the queenside and made it too dangerous to castle in that direction. It's a good game though. Full credit to my opponent's bravery. He sacrificed a knight for a pawn just to get an attack going, but he got a bit too greedy and started trying to scoop up pawns instead of going for the kill, and I managed to get there first.
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