Getting into the groove

Hello again. I hope all of you enjoyed my first blog and game. My second game was against a young talent from the New Jersey Knockouts, NM Evan Ju, a player who's always given me fits in previous encounters dating back five years. Evan's a young rising star, who is very talented and has always seemed to match styles with me. He also likes to set challenges, play actively, and not give anyone easy games, and I knew that before the game. I honestly felt very tired before I even started the game as I had had a long day, but for me the job was to go about it professionally, just give it all I had, and do the best I could.

Since Evan knows me and my style so well, along with his friends knowing a lot about me, I figured he might have some help preparing for me. So, I decided to go with my rare weapon which I don't use much: the Scandinavian defense! 1. e4 d5!? 2. exd5 Qxd5 3. Nc3 Qa5 4. d4 c6 5. Bc4 Nf6 6. Nf3 Bg4!? (6... Bf5 is played more often, as I had looked at some of GM Renier Gonzalez's games (huge expert in Scandinavian), had realized some basic plans, and had some idea what to do). 6... Bg4 I felt sets more challenges and from my experience, I know that young players, especially those who like to set challenges, don't like to defend. I was fortunate enough to put Evan on the defensive from moves 7 - 12 and force him to eat a lot of time off of his clock. That paved the way for me to always being up 20-30 minutes the whole game, a huge handicap that came in handy, as Evan played very well, set a lot of challenges, played actively, and didn't let me get too much activity. I felt that besides his 13. a3?! move (creating a weakness for no real reason), he played brilliantly and accurately despite being very low on time for much of the game. He ended up outplaying me by achieving a nice initiative which forced me to make concessions with pawn structure weaknesses. Luckily, we already were up 2 - 0 in the match at that point, courtesy of Eli's excellent game against strong master Mackenzie Molner and Ben Katz's excellent opening preparation and miniature against master Victor Shen. I was really proud of them as they set a great tone for the team. Even though I saw Dmitry Schneider was losing to Joel, I didn't feel much pressure at all as all I needed to do was make a draw at that point. This made my goal clear: try to simplify to a drawn endgame if I could, try to go for perpetual check tactics, or to create mating ideas. So, I played solidly and even more actively. Evan was playing great until he got into very deep time pressure, and then I won a pawn from him and followed it up with a cute tactic that I was fortunate enough to spot despite getting into time pressure as well (three minutes vs one) approximately.

You can see the rest of the game here as it was definitely interesting and probably would be enjoyable for you to look at. Anyway, I'm happy I was able to come through for the team and able to win again. Thanks again for reading :) I'm looking forward to continuing this :)