Blitz Chess #8: Trying a Second Time to Beat My First Opponent

In this next game, I was playing against the guy with whom I played my very first blitz game on Lichess. In our first game, I lost because I didn't have the guts or my wits about me to make a simple calculation which ended with my being caught in a windmill tactic. I resigned that game. In this game, I still lost as can be seen above but I didn't have the advantage for most of the game unlike the first. One move brought me from a slight disadvantage to a much worse position.

We started off the game in a weird way with the Polish opening. I haven't really encountered much of the Polish before so I was just feeling my way through it. I didn't know much about opening theory neither have I memorized a lot of lines in any openings, much less an obscure one like the Polish. But now that I see it, I feel that it is weird to concede the center as White especially since that is usually the main point of contention but here my opponent does quite well in showing that you can still gain a pretty good advantage even though in the beginning you don't try to fight for the center because there are many ways of indirectly "controlling" that part of the board.

From this, you can see my inexperience showing. I should have moved to occupy the center with the first few moves I made but I didn't. I went passive and that's why White had better grounds to work with. In these instances, you shouldn't shy away from the fight and if your opponent concedes the center, especially if it's in the beginning, then seize it. Otherwise, you will struggle later on much like I did. However, it wasn't just because I played passively that my opponent slowly accumulated his small advantages. There were certain points in the game wherein I could have asserted my position and tried to wrest the advantage away from my opponent.

One chance I could have jumped on was in move 12. It is a bit subtle looking into it but it does make sense. Instead of immediately penetrating the enemy territory with Ra2, I should opened the way for my pieces to find active squares. In that position, there are two pieces in passive squares. Apart from the rook on f8, the knight on d7 and the bishop on b7 aren't doing as much besides defending certain squares and maintaining the stability of my position. But there are ways in which to mobilize them without clearing the tension in the center. Anyway, Ne4 should have been done instead of Ra2. It's not completely bad, though for the next few moves, I needed to be super accurate in order to keep my ever so slight advantage.

I wasn't able to make the precise moves so I ended up losing what little advantage I had and I even blundered a piece which just brought me into an even worse position later on. And in the end, I lost on time though to be fair, I probably would have been able to make something out of the endgame since I could have had three pawns for the piece, with perfect play on my part and a few inaccurate moves on my opponent's part. That didn't happen seeing as my opponent was quite a strong and decent chess player. So with that rematch and loss, I still have a minus score against that guy.