PennApps Chess Tournament
Hello, my friends! Today, I’d like to share about an interesting chess game from the PennApps hackathon with you. The chess tournament was held at the UPenn, and people from the PennApps hackathon as well as the UPenn chess club competed together in one tournament. It was a blitz tournament, with an 8|0 time control (yes, eight minutes - I’m not sure why), so the moves and ideas from the following game are from memory and not notated.
Round 2: ???? (2200) v intermezzio (1400)
The game started out with one of my favorite openings, the Budapest Gambit, with 1. d4 d5 2. c4 e5 3. dxe5 Ng4
A lot is going on in this position. Let me start with the first four moves, until 2… e5, which marks the beginning of the Budapest Defense. White’s first 2 moves are 1. d4 and 2. c4, attempting to control the center of the board. However, this move forces white to weaken his d4 pawn and contest the center, allowing for an interesting tactical game. After 3. dxe5 Ng4, black threatens to regain his lost pawn, and white must respond to him. Typically, white plays the following moves to hold onto the pawn until black finally takes it back. This is the Rubenstein variation, named after the grandmaster who first played it.
However, my opponent played a sideline of this opening, continuing with 4. Nc3 Nc6 5. Nh3
When you are a beginner in chess, you are usually told phrases like “A knight on the rim is dim” and “control the center of the board”. So why does white play the move 5. Nh3?
The answer is to control the d5 square, a square poorly defended by my pieces. White plans to move this piece from Nh3-f4-d5 where it will find a strong outpost later in the game. The other knight plans to do the same with Nc3-d5.
Although I (as black) knew his plan, I did not know how to stop it. After some moves like Ngxe5 (to take the pawn back) and Bb4 (to trade off the knight), the white knight still found its way to the d5 square.
Later on in the game, white ended up castling kingside and put pressure on the d4 and d5 squares with tactics along the a4-e8 diagonal. I (as black) went down a pawn yet had counterplay due to white’s weakness on d3. As it was a fast blitz match, I dropped the exchange and the game eventually ended in a win for white. However, I remember this game most because it was the first (and only) time anyone ever played Nh3 against me in the opening, with the intention of controlling d5.