Hall of Shame, Episode 2

In my defense, I was on a late-night blurry-visioned blitz binge when I missed this mate. Still, there is no reason for me to miss this as long as I still test positive for brain stem activity.

Make sure you're familiar with this mating mechanism...it pops up quite often, and you see it in a lot of tactics books.



1. Bxh7+ Kh8 2. Bg6+ Bh6 3. Qxh6+ Kg8 4. Qh7#

This was an example of chess blindness. During my few seconds of analysis I thought that the king would escape via f7, missing that my queen prevents that.

Hall of Shame, Episode 1

I'm still getting settled in to my new locale, but I've started playing chess locally and getting back into the groove.

The following position is from a casual but slow game, which was a grueling, back-and-forth, positional struggle. I am relying on my memory here, since regrettably I did not keep score:



I am playing Black. I decided to dart across enemy fire to bring my king to the defense on the kingside. I had calculated that the pawn endgame after 1... Ke5 2. Re1+ Kf6 3. Rxe7 Kxe7 should at least be a draw. However, there are two major flaws with this sequence. My opponent found the lesser of the two rebuttals (which was enough for me to immediately resign) but missed the best response.

Try to find the two biggest flaws with my intended sequence. Using a chess engine is gauche.

I'll post the answers later.