Fighting the urge

My round 5 match of my current tournament was a fairly straightforward win. My accuracy according to the engine report on my local En Croissant was 96.1%, and I was never worse from an evaluation standpoint. That being said, there were several instances of the game itself where things could have very easily gone wrong, especially in a blitz game. It required me to calculate sharply and deeply enough to determine whether certain ideas were actually good for me. Because of that, I would like to try a different format for this post. Rather than going through the moves and outlining my rationale/thinking/observations/etc., I'm going to post some positions from the game, or those that could have easily happened in the game, and challenge you to work through them yourself!

But first, here's the match with no annotations or markups:

Mike vs. G. J. (July 2026)

If you're not interesting in working through the problems below, feel free to open up my study to the chapter with this game that contains my annotations and notes. However, if you are interested in challenging yourself, work through the positions first as the annotations contained in the study may provide the answers. I recognize that some of these positions are not that difficult, but in my opinion, it should provide some good practice either way!

Position 1: Does 11... Bxh3 work for Black?

Position 2: Does 14... Nxe4 work for Black?

Position 3: Should White sacrifice a piece on h6? If so, which piece?

Position 4: Does 17. Nxh6 work for White? Find the correct continuation or refutation

Position 5: White to play

Position 6: Find the fastest checkmate for white