Annotated chess game

young players are always to be taken seriously. They improve very quickly.

Nigel Short was only 15 when he beat GM Tony Miles on the Master Game.

And I have played both of them.... Nigel Short in a quick play.... Tony Miles at backgammon....

My favourite defence for Black. Unfortunately there is a little bit of a cloud hanging over it, I gather...

As a Benoni player myself I think this is the only move in which white maintains advantage. I've won a couple of miniatures where white has taken and won/drawn some positions where white doesn't advance.

I tend to like the main lines of the Benoni too much to play this gambit very often. I think I've had a couple of wins with it on GK with the Black pieces.

Like this, Joe: 8.Qe2 Nf6 9.Nd6#. So the knight can not retreat, but 8...f4 9.f3 will win the knight.

I reckon I would have gone for 5...axb5 6.Bxb5 Ba6.

..... and you now have a passed pawn on a2 after just 7 moves of play!

Note you can't take the pawn back now. Nxd5 Nxd5 (with discovered attack on the queen) Qxb5 (with possible pressure on the b2 pawn and the white knight on d5 is under attack, but pinned to the g2 pawn...except that then Nc7+ wins the queen anyway and black is sad.

The bishop having gone to d2 blocks the queen's defence of the d5-pawn. So Black threatens ...Nxd5; Nxd5 Bxd5. The threat is easily thwarted though. Black was merely using these little short range threats to mobilise his queen and gain a little time.

this type of blunder tends to happen because we get fixated on ideas. Your mind (I'm guessing here) was probably remembering that Nxd5 was not possible and then assumed that Nxe4 was not possible because the same pieces were used in both situation. I read a very illuminating book some years back by GM Krogius on the causes of blunders. Quite, informative, and it cured me of certain types of blunders. He recommended that all players keep track of the blunders, and look for commonality. A lot of times there is a common theme and you can be on guard against it.