Coffee Shop Chess 02

Here are a couple more games from Starbucks in Forestville, MD. The interesting background to these games is that my opponents seem to do much better against me in blitz chess. Most of the time, my clock will run out while I was deeply engrossed in calculations of interesting variations on the board. On these particular occassions, I was challenged to play them "slow" chess, so the moves can be recorded and they can prove to me how really strong they were. I was at first reluctant to this because I knew quite well that their playing strengths in regular chess were such that I would be proving nothing. Nevertheless, I agreed to play a couple of games. The first one is me playing black against Tony. Now, Tony had just announced that he has recently mastered the King's Gambit, and dared anyone to respond with 1...e5 against his 1.e4. So I decided to call his bluff:

In the following game, I was playing white against Little Man (that's his nickname of course, no bearing on his size or anything - actually I have often wondered how he came about that nickname, I guess I will ask him the next time I see him). He accepted all the gambit pawns that I offered him, but found out that the outcome was not too pretty. I should note that subsequent to this game, he has always hesitated to take my gambit pawns!