Chapter 201: A Wild Ending!
’Wait, what?’ Claudia frowned immediately when she saw the development of the game. ’How could my position get worse out of nowhere?’ She shouted inside her head in frustration, somehow feeling a slight doubt about what was going on here.
The surprise that Anna pulled was enough to catch her off guard, forcing her to burn her time for even a simple move like a pawn push or a castle. Not only that, it had been a long time since Claudia played with the Caro-Kann defense, so her memory was a little bit rusty here. Still, the girl remembered clearly that white’s position shouldn’t be as bad as hers if she played everything correctly.
Yeah, somehow, Claudia got two doubled-pawns just in the first eleven moves of the game. First was in the D file, and this was already within her expectations as she remembered clearly this line in her brain. However, the second one was definitely the boomerang that threw her focus away for a moment.
Anna decided to play aggressively, pushing her knight into a very dangerous square that forced Claudia to do something about that piece. In the end, she had to offer an exchange with her own knight on the G3 square, or if not, letting the dark knight roam freely in the middle of the board would be too dangerous in the future. It was a compromise that she was willing to take, but in the end, Claudia was distressed that this move caused her to get the second doubled pawn this early.
*Author note: If you want to visualize the position better, check the comment below.
Even though the evaluation bar showed that this game was pretty equal, not a single sane person in the world would pick Claudia’s position in this case, as only a computer probably could play accurately to get her out of this troublesome situation. However, the little girl still tried her best to do something here.
Unfortunately, it seemed that Anna didn’t want to play around here.
Even with a conservative Caro-Kann opening, she still played in her usual aggressive style. First, she put her king on the safety first, castling it to the kingside. Then, the girl wasted one move to put her king into a more safe position far on the edge of the board; the H8 square. If the chessboard were Earth, the king would probably be in Antarctica right now, completely untouchable by any force that wanted to harm it.
Still, that wasn’t the only purpose Anna had in her mind when she put the king on that square. No, she did that so that the king wouldn’t distract her, as in the next turn, the big sister started pushing her F pawn forward, intending to make a pawn break to put pressure on Claudia’s kingside. Anna wanted to take advantage of her sister’s doubled pawn on the G file to initiate an attack, as almost all of her pieces were ready to jump on that side.
*Author note: If you want to visualize the position better, check the comment below.
This pressure was enough to make Claudia panic. Furthermore, with her time kept ticking down, the little girl felt her mind was hazy, and in that moment, she finally made the first mistake of the game. Instead of putting her queen back to the F3 or the other squares in the same diagonal to escape from the pawn’s pursuit and still maintain flexibility to move, Claudia moved her queen back to the H3 square, a place that was surrounded by her own pawns. Somehow, she accidentally locked her queen down on that square, and it would be a long time before the queen itself could participate back in the game again.
’No, what am I doing here?!’ Claudia scowled in annoyance. ’I have to recover and do some damage control after this!’
This time, it was Anna who spent a little while thinking about her situation. Even though the computer engine showed -1.9 for her advantage, it was still not easy to spot on the board. The big sister had two choices now: either to sac her knight and advance her pawns further, or try to keep it simple by exchanging pieces.
The computer really wanted her to sacrifice her knight. However, Anna remembered the painful lesson in her first game, and the girl didn’t want to repeat that mistake here, not when this was a crucial game for the tournament. Instead of doing that, she pushed her dark bishop into the G5 square to exchange with Claudia’s dark bishop.
Unfortunately, it was not the best move, as the evaluation bar moved up once again to show that the game was back to an equal one, with all the advantages that Anna had just a moment ago being gone completely from the board.
As they both entered the time scramble, more than half of the pieces were gone from the board already. It was the endgame phase, and both Marisa sisters started to treat everything carefully.
The memory of her painful defeat in the first round was still fresh inside Anna’s mind, and she didn’t want to repeat such a stupid mistake this time. Fortunately, the girl played quite fast today, so that her time in the endgame phase was quite a lot, so that she didn’t have to rush here.
As for Claudia, even with the first win she gained against Anna, that didn’t mean her performance was good. Hell, if not for the mistake that her sister made, Claudia was sure it would be her who would lose the game. Then, coupled with her defeat against Irene and Medina, the little sister concluded that her endgame technique was still full of flaws, so she treated this far more carefully than before.
Unfortunately, that thought only lasted for a few moves, as with them having to fight in a time scramble, the rest of the game suddenly turned into a very chaotic one. Both Anna and Claudia made several mistakes that gave the evaluation bar a heart attack. Hell, at some point, the evaluation bar even swung between -2.3 and +1.9, showing how volatile the game was. In the end, though, both players simplified the game with a few more exchanges, and as no advancement was made, Anna and Claudia finally reached an agreement here.
They shook each other’s hands, agreeing to a draw.