Iceman Revisited

Blogger tells me that this is my 127th blog post. Back in post #4, I introduced Iceman. Not the one from Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends, but the one played by Val Kilmer in Top Gun. Iceman is a cool cucumber who makes no mistakes but mainly just waits for you to make your own mistake and then he pounces. In post#4, I cast my opponent as the winning fighter pilot.

Last Thursday's game was no brilliancy. In fact, Fritz's Evaluation Profile shows that I was slightly worse a lot of the time.

For forty moves, we kept the game pretty much balanced, each missing small opportunities here and there. But similar to my game 10 weeks ago against this same opponent, one pawn got too far ahead and all of a sudden the game tipped in my favor. For this performance, I got to play the role of Iceman.

It wasn't as if I just turtled up, since I did make use of the queenside expansion. But sometimes I wish my game was a bit more like Maverick's wild and dangerous style. Still, being an opportunist is not a bad way to go in chess. My old Iceman post has a collection of chess adages surrounding the role of mistakes in chess. I'll reiterate just two of them here:

"One bad move nullifies forty good ones." - I.A. Horowitz
"Without error, there can be no brilliancy." - Emanuel Lasker