Play like Mortal Chess

There was an earlier version of this post with the same basic content, but because of an accident, the content was lost. This is rewritten.

Intro

This post is another entry in the Play like... series and focused on YouTuber Mortal Chess (@on-meds), a chess player and streamer from Zimbabwe. His videos are very funny and sometimes really heartwarming, with decent quality chess in them presented in a concise manner.

I will be focusing on a specific opening system for White, starting with d4 and ending up with a bishop on f4 and a knight on c3.

However, the study will be slightly different than the previous ones in the series. I will be taking the following steps:

• download all the games of @on-meds as White (9995 games)
• load them in PGN Editor
• keep the ones where the game termination is normal and @on-meds won (2493 games)
• focus on the games that after ply 20 (10 moves) have an evaluation of +2 or higher (693 games)
• determine the most common positions with a pawn on d4, a knight on c3 and a bishop on f4 (8 positions)
• create a study chapter with as many moves (Lichess accepts a maximum of 3000) from winning games for each of the positions

In other words, this is "Play like Mortal Chess when he wins as White in the opening d4 Nc3 Bf4".

LiChess Tools

The interactive study chapters will contain a lot of variations, so in order to play all of them you will have to have LiChess Tools installed and Extended Interactive Lessons enabled as well as full transposition support (these are enabled by default, so you should be fine with a default configuration of the extension).

The plan is simple: play with White and guess the moves that were played. The only "wrong" moves are the ones not in the chapter. The computer will also choose random variations from each position to play as Black. At first just push that Solution button and see what the moves are, then try to guess them.

All of the operations performed to extract the chapter data are made with the PGN Editor tool added by LiChess Tools in the Lichess site.

Chapters

There is an Intro chapter, followed by a chapter that contains all the variations from the +2 winning games up to ply 12 (6 moves) so as to be under 3000 moves. Each black response to d4 is bookmarked so you can collapse/expand the following moves.

Then 8 chapters covering the most common positions in this system follow.

The last chapter is whatever variations are left not in the previous 8.

Conclusion

We have explored the style of another chess streamer in a particular system. Whether you like how he plays and want to emulate him or you just want to explore how other people play, this kind of analysis should give you a lot of value, just as Mortal Chess' videos do.

You can find the study here: Play like Mortal Chess when he wins

Enjoy!