Chess Musings

Long ago, team clousems was not a repository of mad ramblings or life tips. It was actually intended to be vaguely chess related. In keeping with this long-lost tradition, I am going to be posting random chess related things in this thread. Probably from my own games. If you want to comment on anything, feel free.

Quick puzzle from an old game.

I was young and foolish when I played this game (now, I'm five years older and still foolish), but I somehow managed to gain a major advantage over a 2000+ rated player in a classical (10+0 was classical on lichess back in 2016) tournament game. While I still ended up winning, I missed a number of forced wins. White has a forced mate here, for instance. Can you spot it?

Hint: The white knight serves a number of purposes in this puzzle.

My definition of forced mate is when the checked king has one only option to remove the check,in a sequence of same that ends in mate. The only force move I can see is rook takes bishop..the only move available for black is rook takes rook...after that,there seems to to no more forces. Certainly there is a win in the offing for white,but I can't see it as forced.
But it's only 8:40AM and one coffee o'clock here.

Here's the solution:

knight pins rook..no check there.black responds with pawn to h6,or even better,h5..opens an escape route..

I used to wax philosophical about the nature of the game itself when I mused on chess. But that was a nice game there.

Longtime members will remember the weekly weird openings*. Here's a master game with one of the openings that was featured in the WWOs-- the Paris Gambit:

*If you're not one of those people, you can probably track them down by going on safari in the team clousems forum. I rarely delete stuff here.

No cool puzzles or weird openings in this one. The only interesting part of this game is that I managed to play a near-perfect game against a 2000+ in the Semi-Slav.
Game from Feb 2016

That was a bloody good game you played,there.

Puzzle from a game earlier today. White to play and win: