Sweet chess victory

So, in tonight's game, Luce took back a couple of moves early on, which I thought were pretty important moves, but I let them slide, because we're trying to be nice, and it sort of relaxes me because then it doesn't feel like a real game or something, if Luce wins I can always say it's cos he took back moves he didn't like. Then I overlooked that my pawn could take his queen, and he didn't let me take it back! The pressure was on because it looked like he could now take my queen for free. World War III nearly broke out, Luce starting packing up his bat and ball and was going home (he had the drawer out and was replacing pieces!!), we shouted that we loved each other and both liked to play chess, so CAN'T WE JUST BE ADULTS ABOUT THIS???

The position turned out not to be as dire as I'd thought, a queen swap, so I gave in and thought that if Luce beat me then I totally didn't need to take it personally, and that if I won that that would show that my chess practice was actually paying off. I won a couple of exchanges, which put me up a rook as our pawns were racing towards the king-line, and I was able to get a queen and then sacrifice my rook to prevent him from reciprocating. We had one 'take-back point', to see if Luce could stop me, but no way jose! :)

I'm definitely improving, I see more pretty patterns on the chessboard each time I look at it :D

A chess victory

At the start of November, Luce & I finally started using the chess board my dad made for us for Christmas last year. I won the first game, then Luce promptly won every game for the rest of the month. Being the competitive types we both are, I obviously cracked it with him and we didn't play for about a month. For Christmas this year, I requested that my dad play a game against Luce, just for the satisfaction of seeing him beaten by anyone (seeing as how I seemed unable to repeat the feat).

However, we started playing again after New Year's, and I am thrilled to be able to report my first victory! A clear checkmate, still in the relatively early stages of the game :) (I'm ignoring the fact that he was reading stuff on his computer the whole time cos I take so long to move and he gets bored!)

In the next game I made a couple of bad errors and resigned, so we 'undid' a few moves and continued. I then mated him, we undid the last few moves, he mated me, we undid the last few moves, and then I got the next 6 mates, ie, even with undos, he was still unable to recover. :D This is the major reason I'm looking forward to going back to Iceland: to be able to practice with Ási and then completely whup Luce on a regular basis. Or at least to make him pay attention to our games... ;)