All moves need to be good

Unlike sports like Golf or Tennis, every move you play needs to be good, as it is hard to come back from a big blunder. I learnt this when I started playing Olympiad chess, although I still full victim to playing good moves up until a point in the game, and then going downhill.
My round 3 game from the Ryde-Eastwood tournament was an example of this. Ignoring my opponents attempt to target my e pawn, I set up a strong attack on his king with Qe3 and Nf5. However it required some exact calculation to work, I immediately began to go wrong. Bxf8 straight away was much stronger, but I decided to remove Nxf3+ as an option by exchanging on e5 first. This wasn't a real problem as after the next few moves I was still better. However I was still in 'forcing' mode when he played Rc6 (which I had foreseen), so missed the idea of b4, activating the bishop on c2. After Ng8 I wasn't worse, but thinking I had run out of strong moves, meekly swapped on f6, and then put up little resistance in the ending.


Press,Shaun - Kargosha,Bahman [C99]
Ryde Eastwood, 01.10.2016