My second rapid game (10 minutes with a 5 second increment) ended disastrously but I had a dominant position until I ran into time trouble. Figure 1 shows the situation before I lost my rook. I only six seconds remaining.
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Figure 1 |
As can be seen, I'm a rook up but two pawns down. All I needed to do was to protect my rook but when seconds remain you do silly things. My opponent had the luxury of 2 minutes and 27 seconds and that made all the difference. This loss cost me a hefty 119 rating points, which seems rather excessive. and took me down to 1608 which is embarassing but it shouldn't be too hard to work my way back up provided a learn to manage my time better.
My response to White's initial e4 was the Pirc Defense characterised by d6. I quite like this response but need to research it further. The YouTube channel Journey to Grandmaster is promoting it heavily via a playlist of 11 videos. See Figure 2.
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Figure 2 |
