Against Stockfish: Game #40: Look for comfort

Cheers to my 50th blog post on Lichess!!!

I feel more motivated to work after my underwhelming performance in my last tournament. It's been a while since I last wrote two against Stockfish articles within 24 hours, but here we are. This game wasn't as great as the first game, and the main reason I see for this is my opening choice. Take a look.

The Game

• The main highlight of this game was my opening choice. I have never played this line of 1.c4 e6 2.e4!? over the board, and I am glad I didn't. The structures arising from this line are quite difficult to handle. Even though Black is not better, his position is much easier to play than White's. This was clear to me as even without any theoretical knowledge of the position, I figured out that the idea of Nc6-Nge7-long castle was Black's best continuation when I played 7.d4.
• The next highlight was 16.Nxd1?! The original idea that I had when I played 13.Ne5 was to play Rxd1 in this position. But I also saw that after 16.Rxd1 Nf5, my dark square bishop doesn't have a good square to retreat to, and I thought Black should be slightly better. But since I saw that after 15...Rxd1+ I don't have to take with the rook and I have other options, I decided to go for it because I thought even if Rxd1 doesn't work, one of the other two moves (Bxd1 and Nxd1) should work. So my evaluation of the position after 13.Ne5 after averaging was very slightly better for black. But then after 15...Rxd1, I started calculating Nxd1. But I completely missed the outstanding 16...g5! This move is structurally not good, so it didn't enter my list of candidate moves, but it works for a tactical reason. There's no good way to protect the pawn. This was what I missed. But I don't think this was the biggest mistake. The biggest mistake was allowing that position by choosing this opening line.
• I was trying to protect the pawn on e5 with 17.g3 and f4, but this weakened my king a bit too much. 17.Bc2 to prevent Ng6 had been better according to Stockfish. I considered Bc2, but it didn't convince me as even though I stopped Ng6, I am not stopping Black from winning the pawn with Bg7 and Nc6. But apparently, allowing this had been better than g3.

Where can I improve?

• Improve your repertoire to get more comfortable positions out of the opening. I will share the improvements I make to my repertoire with this study.
• Modify the algorithm so it takes time situations into account. This is not a gap revealed by this game. I realized this shortcoming of the algorithm when I was playing 10+0 rapid on Lichess using the algorithm yesterday.
• Do more "Guess the Moves" to be familiar with positions (16.Nxd1?!)

That's it for today, I hope you enjoyed the article, and see you next time!
P.S. - If you want to learn about the Intuition-based Averaging Algorithm I talked about in this article, click here.