Another Failed Brilliancy

      I enjoy looking at some of my old games just to see how I played way back when.  This game was played in one of Chess Review’s Golden Knights Championships.  If memory serves my opponent was a college student from Kansas and was rated around 1900 while I was not long out of the US military and also attending school.  It was one of those games where you think you played really well and had some brilliant ideas and fondly remember it that way even if the game turned out to be, as this one was, a loss.

      Of course these days when we all have a grandmaster in our computer that will take a look at the game for us (most GM’s won’t bother unless you pay them) we usually discover the games weren’t really as good as we thought.  I know because Fritz has repeatedly pointed out that a lot of my “brilliancies” were more in the way of what could better be described as “blunders” and the games look like they were played by a patzer.  I know, that should not be surprising because they were played by a patzer but I once heard Dr. Eliot Hearst (I think it was) comment that the definition of a master is every player’s secret evaluation of his own ability.  Fritz pretty much destroyed that for most of us, too. 
      Still, the game wasn’t that bad. The opening was the Caro-Kann: Panov-Botvinnik Attack and for some reason I’ve always liked playing those type positions.
      The Panov–Botvinnik Attack is not surprisingly named after Vasily Panov and Mikhail Botvinnik and often leads to typical isolated QP positions where White gets rapid development, a grip on e5, and kingside attacking chances to compensate for the long-term structural weakness of the isolated d4 pawn.