Anatomy of a Miniature

My opponent chose this tournament to trot out an opening he had just added to his repertoire, a version of the Accelerated Dragon Sicilian. At move seven, the position became unfamiliar to him and he tried to strike out on his own with a tactic in the center that seemed correct, but unfortunately I found the direct refutation. Up to my second-to-last move, I found the best ones and even my second best move carried a heavy psychological toll on my opponent who quickly resigned rather than face a difficult endgame.

My coach had gone over some of the ideas and I had some experience in two games, one I posted in Quagmire, facing this kind of Sicilian against one of the club's Class B members. I was lucky to win the second game.

My style is more of a ground and pound positional and endings game, as opposed to the flying strikes and knockdowns. But lately I've had some success with quick victories. Here's a histogram I generated using Chessbase 8 by highlighting all my games, right clicking and choosing Statistics. There's a radio button that changes the window from the win-loss stats to the game length stats and shows you a histogram.


The mean is about 42 and the mode is 45.

This game is one of my seventh shortest games at 16 moves.

Five weeks ago was my second shortest Flawless and Hollow game at 8 moves.

The longest game at 110 moves is featured in my post Never Give Up. Never Surrender.