It's pretty rare for me to not make any blunders, mistakes, or inaccuracies in a chess game. Oftentimes, there is at least one mistake or blunder unless I'm having a really good day and I make only one inaccuracy for the whole game, which has happened at least once before. I would have to rummage through my game archives in order to find those games and I don't really have the time or energy to do that at the moment. We will just see it when it pops up in the queue. For now, we will have to be satisfied with just a few inaccuracies.
The opening was not too bookish or standard I'd say because I don't really like going up against openings where there's too much theory. And the French defense is one such opening. So I try to mix it up early on when I play against people who are most likely in their element when playing such. I mean, even up against the Sicilian defense, when I play as White, I try to muddy the waters and get my opponents out of the known or conventional lines just so that they wouldn't be going off on generally well-known sequences wherein missing out on a move order could mean disaster for you. Anyway, I tried to deviate from the normal lines, structures, or move orders to confuse my opponent even just a tiny bit.
I guess it paid off because I was able to gain the advantage after a few moves out of the opening. I don't really know how it happened but things seemed natural and we made somewhat natural looking moves but then for some reason, he made a mistake. And that mistake was Bd6. I mean it looks normal enough. Once the bishops are exchanged, Black would be fine. However, you can insert a zwischenzug before taking the bishop since my bishop was protected by the knight anyway. And I took the d-pawn first. Now see, that's one of the trickiest things to decide in chess. When do you keep the tension and when do you release it especially between pawns? In this case, at least, he should have let the tension go first before playing Bd6 because then, he wouldn't have to deal with the zwischenzug. But hindsight's 20/20 and we move on.
From that point, he could've simply played a pawn down which is not big thing. Material isn't the only basis for any advantage in chess. If you have compensation in terms of position or even time, then you can let go of material. Just try to find some other way to make up for the loss. Now, the thing that I was a bit surprised by was that he simply let me take his knight instead of being down a pawn. He might have panicked because he didn't see the zwischenzug, maybe he didn't see that his knight was being attacked. In any case, it was a free knight and I took it. I had no issues for the rest of the game. I just consolidated my position and inched my way to victory.
I did make a few other inaccuracies, don't get me wrong. But those were negligible enough that it didn't affect the end result. I had a big advantage since move 10 and I kept that advantage all the way to the end. I know based from experience that you shouldn't really be so caught up with trying to memorize variations and openings because for beginners like me, that's just too impossible. I mean, that's the reason why I shake things up. But at the very least, one needs to play the opening well and come out of it relatively unscathed so that the game wouldn't so stressful through and through. If you make a mistake in the opening, it will be harder to pull back up from that.
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