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These days, when you’re looking up games, you need to pay special attention to whether or not the game was played online.
Let’s take the game Donchenko-Malek played on 11/07/2023 in the early Titled Tuesday. Since this game is in an opening I play (the Caro), I decided to look at it since I often look at games in TWIC that are played in my openings.
We start out with a sideline:
Here, Malek plays 3…g6 instead of taking the pawn and exchanging queens. Cool, I don’t look at these lines too often, so this is some good stuff.
I keep going through the game, and it’s just dead level, but I can see that Malek wins, so what the heck.
One move from the end of the game, Black is slightly better, but nothing spectacular. Then:
In this position, Donchenko, clearly intending to play 29.Rd6, instead plays 29.Rd5.
Ah. No wonder the game is lost.
Here is the entire game for anyone interested.
Just a reminder that in the digital chess age, you can’t take a result at face value 100% of the time.
Til Next Time,
Chris Wainscott