European Championship 2012 - 4rd round

I will show you why and how chess can be soooo painful:

Manelidou - Pein

In this position I played Black and I was fine. My home preparation appeared on the board and I felt comfortable. White's bishop on c1 is not doing much but locks in the rook on a1 and the kingside is already weakend by the g4-g5 push. White's plan is to capture my bishop after Qh3 - that I can sacrifice for capturing  some important pawns - so I calculated a loooong line:


16. ...Ne7 17. Qh3 Bb5 18. Re1 Bxe2 19. Rxe2 Qxd4 20. Be3 Bxf2+ 21.Bxf2 Qxb2 22. Rb1 Qa2

Now it's easy to see the deadly hit, but six moves before it wasn't obvious. White only needed to calculate 1-2 moves ahead...

Bxg6!! 1-0

16... Rac8 was the way to avoid disaster. The moral of the story is that you should not calculate long lines if you cannot do that properly.  :) So again I have zero points from a good starting position. Better luck next time.

After this painful loss I went sightseeing a bit. I couldn't look at chessboards for a while...

Plovdiv center

The Maritsa river

Relaxation. Reporting back home