Very short games and marathon premove skillz

The in-between comments may be superfluous, but it must be said that some good chess punch-ups are included below. In other words, you can skip all this text and just click through the Chess.



First of all, here is the mate in eight I was happy to play a few days ago and which inspired me to look for more of such short games. White sees an unsufficiently protected pawn and thinks he can unpin the N with Qxd8+. And then, I say, no waii!!

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OK, it's lame I am showing only this considering it was only one out of eighty games in which I was constantly straining myself, trying to keep up in vain, while he was just chilling and beating the crap out of me - so far he has scored a convincing 70.0/79 without even trying. However, this type of game is important for me, as in some way it keeps the chess spirits high. For one thing, it's a friendly gesture of his to give a newbie the chance to play so often in a row. Playing many games with a much stronger player is a way of testing yourself and making yourself think about what he is doing that he is so much better at this activity than you are. Moreover, when winning the statistically justified 1 out of 10 I feel brilliant, in a whim forgetting all about the other nine where I was pretty much a pushover. :)

OK, enough of that self-praising crap (sometimes I need the ego boost) here are some short games from the archives that weren't too obviously finished due to mouse slips or that ended because of external factors like interface/disconnection problems.

That's one of the nice things of having a 10,000+ games database - most of the individual games are virtually meaningless, but all together they form a source that guarantees to find positions and games based on the criterion you happen to choose. And chess is a very nice game, there are many things about it that can aesthetically please me and other chess junkies all around the globe.

OK, lately I have been enjoying FICS and its "bughouse" facility (beware kids, +ch24 is a very rough and hostile community). While hanging around there, I have also become to appreciate the site ficsgames.com: now I have downloaded a PGN of 2500+ blitz/lightning games of mine played in the period 2005-2010. Neat, isn't it? I didn't even know there was an automatic track going on, and now I can find all the moves played in a blitz match I played with a friend on a random afternoon in 2005:-)
My hat is off to the volunteers (user names like Ludens, seberg, knighttour, marcelk if I understand correctly) making this highly interesting Chess Archive Service possible, free of cost.

So thanks to that site and database filtering, here is a short game from FICS I played over two years ago. It's not much, but it's the most entertaining game in under 10 moves I could find. And it's a mildly instructive loss as well. Don't give away your damned pieces.

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And here are more shorties from the Web archives

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And a few I won before you can say weak dark-square complex

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After these quick wrap-ups, here is a marathon game where, despite being down a significant amount of time, I eventually checkmated exactly on the 100th move; 0.1 vs. 20 sec left on the clock.

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