In another thread I suggested we post chess games we’re proud of. No one commented so I’ll just make the thread myself. Hopefully Glee and the other chess players here much stronger than I will post theirs.
This is a messy long game. Around 40 he declined the draw by repetition. Its the end I’m most proud of if one wants to skip to then. How I boxed in his king with a pawn and bishop.
Can I just relate an anecdote? I haven’t recorded a chess game in 35 years and tossed all my chess notes and games long ago.
I think it was Junior year of High School. I was playing 3rd board and had a moment of clarity. I wrote out my next 7 moves and went into rapid mode.
He moved as expected and I snapped off my move and hit the clock like it was speed chess. He pondered his move taking longer than he had been taking. I moved instantly. Snap goes the clock. Repeat for 5 moved when he drops his queen to a fork not doing what I anticipated. He then resigned. I was suppose to be up one pawn with this exchange but the method of play I used seemed to psych him out badly.
8th grade lunch. I’m White and obviously have no idea what to do against a Sicilian. The game went essentially like this:
1 e4 c5
2 Bc4 Nf6
3 Nc3 d6
4 Nf3 Bg4
At this point, Black went to get another carton of milk, which gave 12-year-old me the time to find this Légal/Scholar hybrid trap:
5 e5 dxe5
6 Nxe5 Bxd1
7 Bxf7#
Six years later, Black won the U.S. Junior Open.
(I’m not exactly sure about some of the moves – maybe my QN and his KN were still at home, maybe he played g7.)
This is an interesting idea. 
Here’s an exciting game from the UK National Team championship (I was Black):
and White resigned.
He sacrificed a pawn early on; I then sacrificed a piece; he then sacrificed a piece; I offered my Queen and then he offered his Queen!
But after Qxh6+ gxh6 Rc7+ Kg8 Rg7+ Kh8 he has a draw by perpetual check.
High school, probably senior year which would be 1978/1979. I’m walking down a hallway when I see a guy seated with a chess board on the table. I asked him about it and he said he’s in the chess club. Chess club? I asked. I didn’t know there was a chess club. But I want a member of any clubs.
Anyway I asked him for a game and he said sure. I sat down, we played, I kicked his ass, and then I thanked him and walked away.
I don’t remember the moves. I only remember the win.
While in high school a friend showed me how to win a game of chess in 4 moves. A few days later played a gal that claimed her father was a chess master (found out later he played chess at a high level) and she would kick my butt. I used the 4 moves I learned and beat her.
When I was in college I was occasionally play street chess near my apartment. One day I had a game going and we had a small group watching.
I’m not any sort of good chess player, but that day I played the best combination I’ve ever put together. It involved setting a trap for a discovered check.
I had to sacrifice a player or two and some apparent position to make it work, and my opponent and the audience were starting to jeer a little. I kept my head down while he fell for the trap. When I made the move that sprung it he peered at the board for a moment and suddenly realized he was completely f*&^ed. King was in check, queen about to be taken and his game completely blown up. The spectators then saw it too and began jumping around, pointing, laughing and yelling that he was done.
It was the chess equivalent of sneaking up behind someone and putting a knife to their throat before they even knew I was there. Best game I ever played.
No transcript, because it was over a board in a casual game, but the game I’m most proud of is the first time I conceded against my nephew. He’d beaten me a few times before, but that was always by capitalizing on a blunder I’d made, or setting a mate trap that I didn’t see coming, or the like. This time, though, he’d just plain outplayed me. He had most of my pieces locked down, while most of his were still free to move, and when he then leveraged that into a material advantage, too, I knew I wasn’t going to recover.
(Needless to say, I’m not all that great, and I expect by now he’s probably significantly better than I)
No doubt this was 1. er e5 2. Bc5 Nc6 3. Qh5 Nf6?? 4. Qxf7 mate.
The quickest checkmates are:
and
Here’s a short club game:
I was pleased with my last move (Nxb5) as it forced resignation with the unstoppable threat of Nc7+ (either checkmating or winning the Queen after bxa8=Q+)
Instead bxa8=Q+ Qxa8 Nxb5 leaves me two pawns up, but the game drags on.
He might have meant “4 moves” as in “2 from each player”, i.e., the second one of your examples.
I did once win in six moves, the Fool’s Mate plus a few irrelevant moves, against a computer (set at a very low difficulty).
I played a lot of speed chess. I had plenty of 4 move wins and once got that elusive 2 move win. But in competition, normal speed, anything under 20 moves was really rare and those were usually resignations and not checkmates.
Here’s a game that has stuck in my mind. Some background:
We had a group of 6 friends that met each week and played chess. Everyone was rated between 1900-2100, and we played tournament rules. In 1980, I suggested we play a tournament with each round having a prescribed opening, a “Zugzwang Tournament”. Since all the players were good and well acquainted with the other’s weaknesses, there was quite a bit of negotiation. We ended up with 10 openings, of 4-6 prescribed moves (so no deep variations). This game is Alekhines Defense (1. e4 Nf6, 2. e5 Nd5, 3. c4 Nb6, 4. d4 d6)). I played White. My opponent was rated about 50-75 points higher than me.
The reason it is important to me is that I had recently read Spielman’s The Art of Sacrifice in Chess, and this was the first game I felt showed I really absorbed the primary lesson of the book (that material, space, and tempo are tradable quantities). I also managed to carry out a precision Kingside attack in severe time trouble (about 5 minutes for moves 30-40).
The first 20 moves were mixed. Neither side played perfectly. I managed to work up a Kingside attack, but at the expense of a Bishop for a Knight and a precarious central pawn structure. By move 22, my attack was dissipating and I was looking forward to getting slowly but surely positionally crushed in the center. So on the 25th move, I dangled a pawn, which my opponent gobbled up. This opened new avenues of attack and my hammer blows (plus the psychological effect on my opponent) ended up in a Queen and two pawns (white) versus a Rook, Knight, and two pawns (black) ending, which I won in 76 moves.
This is the first time I’ve tried to post a game to the web, so I hope this works.
Here’s the position just prior to Whites 25th move so you can guess the sacrifice.(I hope):
I think you can play the game through the end with the arrows and go back to the start with the double arrow and play the opening as well, but I’ve only tested it on my computer, so please let me know if I succeeded.
Its really interesting that on move 12 (I moved the game to Chess.com) the engine still has you all almost even. Even though lookswise you seem to be ahead.
Move 35: Don’t you hate when your revealed check doesn’t net much of worth? By the way the engine had you up 6.5 at that point and hated the move Bg7+,but all went back to you being up when the King gobbled the bishop.
I love chess.com…I couldnt understand why on move 57 you didnt move QB8…rook takes…then pawn takes rook and becomes a queen. Because there’s several ways black gets out of that
The engine also said you had two brilliant moves in that
Here’s a game i recently played that I’m proud of…again we’re talking about two 1200 rated players. i like it because I know I’ll never be a player above 1500ish?? If im lucky, because I’ll never grasp games like this where all the pieces are locked up. A 1600+ player will keep the pieces locked up and I’ll get impatient.
Example in the game Peccavi just posted, there were tons of moves of pieces moving back and forward for apparently no good reason, but obviously the two players were four moves ahead.
Now I’m proud of this game cause I was able to immediately seize on the mistake and double pawns up in front of his king. And for the last moves where I exposed an attack on his queen. It wasn’t easy for him to see and he’d have to run his queen some five squares away. Which most players arn’t looking for there.
Thanks. I can’t reach chess.com from my work computer, so I’ll take a look at it after work. I have never uploaded a game before, and I couldn’t easily find a way to do it on chess.com (no simple step by step instructions).
What were the brilliant moves? I know the pawn sacrifice wasn’t brilliant, because I knew at the time that he didn’t have to take the offered exchange, opening up new lines of attack for me. He could have just continued to slowly strangle me.
Move 12: We may be theoretically even, but I hated losing that bishop when I was setting up to attack on the Kingside (and my opponent knew that- it’s the disadvantage of playing someone who knows your game well).
Move 35: The revealed check got me his queen! I was in serious time trouble at that point (we both were) and the position requires precision at every move, but at that point I could see a variety of mates if black misplayed even a little bit and had calculated that I would at least win material with the check. What does the engine say was a better move?
Move 57: He’s not going to take my queen. It’s just going to sit there* until I decide to move it somewhere else. My endgame plan, once we got down to queen and two pawns versus rook, knight, and two pawns, was to use the a-pawn to tie up black’s pieces and hoover up black’s pawns, bring white’s king into play and win with the f-pawn. A key element of this is to not allow black’s king to reach the b-file. Note the “tempo check” on move 61 instead of capturing black’s last pawn. Done entirely to keep black’s king where it was.
*Which reminds me of another game I played in which I discovered late in the opening that if I moved my queen to my opponents QB1, where it would be unprotected and takeable by my opponent, I would win if my opponent took my queen. However, if he did not take my queen, it was a wasted move, I threatened nothing with the move. But…it was so delicious, I had to make the move. And he ignored the queen. and continued development. And I had to move it to a more sensible position on the next move.
But it was worth it for the look on his face when I did it!
Not sure if thats showing the game correctly. It liked move 33 and 36. Those were the ones it called brilliant. For some reason on move 35 it wanted you to do Rg3 first.
On chess.com on ‘analysis’ you can copy paste the chess game PGN in a field on the right.
Apparently 35: bg7+ actually blunders a draw. Black can just sidestep the check and then, with perfect play, reduce to a Queen v. two Rooks ending that, according to the computer, is drawn. I guess I trust the computer, but haven’t really analyzed exactly why it’s drawn.
Computer prefers: Rg3, Rch3, or even Kf1 to maintain a winning position.
That’s a little bit odd. I’ll have to see what the computer does if I play Rg3 earlier when I get access to chess.com this evening.
Move 33 was sort of a “gut instinct” move based on the need to open things for my rooks and queen, but not entirely calculated because of my time trouble. However, moves 33-36 were one sequence (at least the way I calculated them), and I regard 35 as the linchpin (it creates a planned position for 36).
ETA: Thanks @Jas09 , I did worry about the king move at the time, but I figured I at least wasn’t losing.
In the game as played, there were opportunities leading to a draw. If I allowed all the pawns to come off, even if it was at the cost of black’s knight, it would be very hard to win.