Trip to Bend

I had been on a winning streak in chess against Finn. In our last game during the beginning of the middle-game, I pushed a pawn in the center, and instead of taking he pushed back, threatening my knight. Looking ahead, if we played out the exchange I could have traded up, getting two of his pieces for one of mine. I moved my knight up, when really I should have moved it back. Instead of going through the whole exchange, he moved around to double, then triple threaten it.

Then I got into a hairy situation as he pinned my king to the back line, first with a knight, then with a bishop after I exchanged it. Looking at the post-game analysis there was an opportunity to kill the knight with my queen and get away with it, since his queen was also threatened, but I missed it in the moment. He would have either lost his knight and queen for my queen, or he would lose the knight and spend a move saving his queen, where I could then save my own queen. After that my king was stuck on the back rank and my rook was trapped in the corner.

There were a couple other questionable pawn pushes that didn’t go my way. Towards the end of the game I traded my queen for an opportunity to kill the bishop trapping my king, which allowed me to hunker down in the corner with both rooks protecting the king. He had a queen and two rooks, and like five extra pawns ready to march across the board to promote to extra queens. He traded both rooks to kill one of mine, then used the queen to clean up my remaining pawns. It came down to just my king hiding behind a rook. I traded the rook for his queen, but he got another one on the next move by promoting a pawn.

It was absolutely hopeless. I have nothing but a king, and he was pushing another pawn to make two queens to finish the job. I started marching across the board on a suicide mission toward his king, eventually coming up against the line of pawns protecting his king in his castle. As he promoted his second queen, the game ended in a stalemate, cutting off my escape diagonal, leaving me no more moves available, yet not being in check. It was an absolute evisceration, yet still ended in a draw.

I can’t lose. /s