In case you don’t know, I used to be kind of nerdy. (I know what you’re saying: “used to be?”) I was a member of the chess club throughout all of Junior High, 7th through 9th grades. And I was captain of the chess team my 9th grade year. I had a great time all three years and I have great memories from them. Anyway…

I won’t go into the whole story, but last night in some internet surfing I came across the home page of a guy I beat in the Minnesota Junior High State chess tournament in 9th grade. I happen to remember the name and the game because he was the 2nd highest rated player in the tournament at the time I beat him and thus a big and memorable upset for me.

A link on his site brought me to the homepage of the US Chess Federation. After some mucking around I found my membership data which was also linked to the results of a number of tournaments I played in during my 9th grade year, including the state tourney where I had that huge upset.

In a wave of nostalgia I looked through some of the tounaments. Probably my best one was where I scored 3.5 points out of 4 to tie for 2nd place. In the tournament I beat some unrated guy; my good friend Jay, who was rated higher than me (1519 vs 1264); another kid who was rated even higher than Jay (1738); and I scored a draw against another highly rated guy (1636). I don’t know what I had for breakfast that morning, but I should never have tried anything else.

After looking through my digital results I wondered if I could find something more concrete to look through. Being a pack-rat, I was able to dig through a few piles of stuff and bring out my old scorebooks where I kept notation of all of my chess games. They are little spiral notebooks where you write down all of the moves you do in a chess game. It is meant both as a way to slow yourself down so you don’t make a hasty mistake and also as a learning tool so you can go back over what you did right and wrong during the game. I was able to find the particular game I was thinking about. It was played on April 4th, 1992.

If you don’t know algebraic notation or much about chess, the rest of this probably won’t be very interesting.

Okay, here is what ended up being the critical moment in that game. Keep in mind, I was playing on the second board of the state tournament against someone rated 1844 to my 1304, so I was a bit nervous.

The moves leading up to this position were:

14. Nd4-e2 O-O-O
15. O-O Rh8-g8
16. Rf1-e1 Qe7-e4
17. Ne2-g3 …

The knight just moved providing a double attack on my queen. My next move was called excellent by my coach and my opponent resigned 5 moves later. Can you figure out my move? I don’t think it is a forced mate, but my very competent opponent did not find a way out of it. So either my move was very strong or he made a blunder following it up; or maybe both.

Since I had my notebook out I decided to look through some more games. I came across one where I had marked a move as excellent myself. I found this a little presumptuous on my part (I could be cocky in 9th grade) so I thought I would go through the game and see what made this move so great. I found that it was actually a pretty good move. The move I marked as excellent is actually the 2nd move in the problem given below.

The game was played on March 7th, 1992 in a league match against our arch rivals from Zachary Lane. I was playing on the 3rd board of 5 on the “B” team (so the 8th board over all).

I had just given up three pawns for a knight and the position was thus:
Black to move. Mate in 4.

The first person to post the winning combo gets the knowledge of knowing that you were able to figure out what a 9th grader figured out. (ha, I kid, I kid) Don’t peek at the comments until you’ve thought about it at least a little bit.

I will post my moves later, but I hope you try to figure it out.

The diagrams were created using the Apronus Interactive Chessboard with Diagram Generator. Quite a sweet little web app, if I do say so myself.