I SHOCKED My Tournament Opponent!!!!

Good morning everyone! Rise and shine it is the second day of the Chess Olympiad and I am here in Budapest, Hungary to represent my country Sweden. Yesterday we beat Fiji with 4-0 and today we are facing New Zealand which is a team that is lower rated than us but they are all rated like 1900 so it's still gonna be a tougher match than yesterday probably. Now let me know in the if any of you are from New Zealand. I've never been but I've always wanted to go but I'm really excited for today's match. I woke up with a lot of energy. I just had breakfast and now I'm gonna sit down and look at the games that my opponent plays and prepare a little bit against her and I'm just hoping that I can play some good chess today. I'm very excited. I'm gonna be board three. I'm gonna have the white pieces and I'm hoping it's gonna be a good game so I'm excited. Let's go ahead and prepare. Also I went to the gym yesterday and I can feel all my muscles being so sore and it feels amazing. I love it. Some coffee to the room because coffee is the greatest thing on earth and I love coffee more than anything. Coffee is amazing. On a different note, Susan Polger, one of the legendary Polger sisters, just tweeted a picture or some pictures of me and my family. Look and she said chess royalty and then there's this picture of my mom and my dad from yesterday. There's a picture of me from yesterday. There's a picture while here of my mom is so out thinking, very focused and concentrated and then after I posted this, I retweeted it. She said, I still remember the days when your dad was pushing you in a stroller while your mom was playing the Olympiad. You did not cry or disturb anyone. There is no family that loves chess as much as yours. That is so sweet. Thanks, Susan. And it's also such an honor to have such a legendary person in the history of chess tweet this about me and my family. So thanks, Susan. Time to prepare now. I just had lunch and got back to the room and now I'm gonna do the final prep before I go to the playing hall. I'm expecting my opponent to play the King's Indian and I think she's gonna play a line which goes with c5. So we will see if that's true. But I'm really excited and I love playing at the King's Indian. It's one of my favorite openings to play again. So I'm hoping that today goes well. All right, let's soon get changed then go to the playing hall. Okay, I just got changed. I'm feeling kind of fancy today so I'm wearing a top that has a bunch of pearls and sparkles. And also I'm gonna wear the Swedish national jacket on top. Time to go to the playing hall and play some chess. Wish me luck. I just finished my game and this is an extremely exciting one. So I was playing against Isabel Ning from New Zealand who's rated 1915 and who's a CM. So I had the white pieces and I was expecting her to play a King's Indian and that did happen. So in the beginning of the game I was really happy. I was blitzing out my moves. I played h3. She castled and I went for this move knight f3. Now I think I told you before but I was expecting her here to play the move c5 but instead she played e5 pretty quickly and so I thought okay maybe she's switching it up a bit. I mean obviously all of these girls are super prepared and that's how everyone is here. But it was fine. I was still kind of expecting this. So I played bishop g5. She went knight a6 and here I spent some time thinking and the reason I spent some time thinking it's maybe a little bit stupid. I think actually I should go g4 here but the reason I spent some time thinking was because here I typically play bishop e2 and after moving this bishop I was a little bit worried that she would go h6 and then knight h5 and I have a really bad track record with this opening and this position. It can get really sharp and I thought okay if she's prepared then she might get into this and I didn't want to play this. So I spent some time thinking and ended up playing knight d2 here and the idea is that now this whole idea is not as strong anymore because after this she cannot play f5 because after take she cannot take with the pawn anymore as the knight is hanging and you never really want to take here with any piece. So I played knight d2 and she played queen e8 and this is actually one of the main lines. My mom told me that this is the reason a lot of people don't really play this so much but it's totally fine for white. White is slightly better. It's just an idea and the idea of this is to get the queen out of this diagonal because black wants to play f5 as quickly as possible but maybe doesn't want to commit to going h6 so that is the idea of this. So I played bishop e2 and now she went knight d7 and here I was thinking that I wanted to play a3 with the idea that if she places her knight here which I could tell that she wanted to do. I could feel it. I could sense it in her. I wanted to be able to play this move b4 taking advantage of the fact that there's a pin here right now but somehow I got worried about her being able to play f5 here which is the main move. The idea being that now after takes I just for some reason thought that this could maybe get a little bit tricky. I don't know. I think I saw some ghosts. It's a thing in chess but so I played g4 instead to prevent that f5 but now after her knight got up to c5 I regretted not going for this a3 because this knight just became so strong. So I played knight b3 here just to trade off these knights and she played a4 and so I traded and then I went queen b2. Now here I could maybe start pushing this pawn. As you can see this is going to become a race. I want to start running over here. My opponent wants to play f5. You know my king is still in the center but I think I should be slightly faster and I should go h4 and h5 and just run with my pawn. I played queen b2 and she went f5 and after takes and takes I'm pretty sure I should just play f3 but I started getting really excited here and I thought after rook g1 and king h8 I thought that this idea was fantastic but spoiler alert it wasn't and the reason this isn't so good I thought that she was going to go um I thought she was going to go rook here and then I was planning on going long castling and then just taking and I thought this would be great but she simply took my bishop and after she played queen e7 I realized that I was in some deep trouble because she's threatening to go queen f6 and she's also threatening my pawn and if I go something like long castles I mean she's just going to pick up my pawn and then this pawn is hanging and do I really have any attack? No I haven't attacked in my dreams you know and so here I started getting really worried and so I spent a lot of time thinking here um and I ended up going f3 which is the best move to keep all my pawns alive I thought you know I can't be a pawn down but now I was extremely worried about her taking taking and then going something like queen f6 because now I am basically forced to take and I thought that this end game would be quite bad for me because my pawns are so weak and my king is still not castled and her rook is more active so I was really not liking this but fortunately she played this in the wrong move order and she started out by playing queen f6 which is a wrong move because now that this file is not open she doesn't have the site she doesn't force me to trade queens as she cannot play queen f2 check anymore and so I played here the the best move and the only move that I think I can play to not be worse which is rook g6. Now this move is really clever because I'm threatening the queen so the queen has to move and if she picks up my rook which she did she should probably go back but that's quite a difficult decision to make after she picks up my rook I have queen f takes f8 check and after queen g8 I had to make a choice do I take a draw with the repetition there's a three-fold repetition force if I check check check and check she'll never get out or do I push for the win. Now I started looking at the boards next to me I looked at how uh Lavigna was doing I looked at how Inna was doing the boards two and four I looked at how my mom was doing and I thought you know I wasn't sure what was going on on board number two and I thought okay it is a bit risky for me to keep on playing maybe the best thing I should do is take a draw especially considering the time difference here but I remembered what Grandmaster Hammer said yesterday which was that he thought that I was better at end games than people that are lower rated than me and so he thought Anna you should try to get into end games because even if it's not completely equal they will typically blunder and I thought okay let me give this a chance I felt like up until this point she had I hadn't put enough pressure on her and I thought okay you know what I'm higher rated I trust myself I have confidence and I'm gonna put pressure on this person and if she wants to draw you know then we should fight for the draw uh we shouldn't just take a draw here I thought and so I decided to keep on playing but I started out by doing some checks just to gain a few moves um as I get extra time by move 40 and now I played h4 just that this pawn wouldn't be hanging she played bishop d7 I went king d2 she played rook f8 I went check and I was playing all these moves with very little time because I only had four minutes left and I had still 13 moves I had to make in four minutes um before the time control before I get an extra 30 minutes added to my clock I do get 30 seconds per move but still um and so here I played king e3 and she ended up taking on e4 which I was extremely happy about I thought she might go check and then try to go for this pawn because in this position the single only problem that I have is the fact that all my pawns are in light squares the queen side is locked and this pawn is really weak so the only way I can lose this game is if I lose this h pawn with no counter play and I knew this so she took here on e4 in the moment she did it I was really happy and here I had to make a difficult choice do I take with the pawn or with the knight taking with the pawn would actually be a huge mistake because what I need to do is that I need to get rid of this knight so that I can start playing on the queen side and open up some files for my rook and I could immediately sense that this knight was just way too strong my knight isn't really doing much apart from maybe attacking a few pawns but this knight is right now a monster so I traded knights and after rook f4 I went for this move h5 and now the idea was that well I needed to play against these pawns I thought maybe she'll go rook h4 and then I saw ideas of going c5 and rook g5 and I needed to get my rook active so she played h6 to prevent my rook from going up to a from to g5 and here I probably played the move that I'm the happiest about in the whole game which is b4 incredibly important move I'm threatening to go c5 and I'm threatening to open up some files for my rook this rook which came here with the idea of threatening this pawn is right now actually a little bit not so well placed and after takes and takes which is what she played the a file is going to be open for my rook and now I felt very confident so she played rook h4 and I went b4 because I didn't want to allow her to go for checks and maybe winning this pawn she played bishop e8 which I thought she was going to play and this is now a big mistake she should go check but this is not a really easy position and here probably actually she should just go and go back and forth and check me a million times because I can't really put my king over here as then when she picks up this pawn it's going to be pinned it's very complicated but there's a lot of different ideas in this position she played bishop e8 and now my rook could go to a1 the open file and after she took this pawn takes takes rook check my rook is now super active I'm a pawn down but now my rook is active and you know what they say active rooks and rooking games are the greatest thing ever that's everything you need so now actually I'm doing really well and uh this was a move 38 I only had to make two more moves before my extra time and I felt really happy about that so she went check king f2 I wanted to place my king on f2 because I wanted to be closer to this pawn um I was a little bit worried about this pawn kind of pushing and now she played rook c3 now if she plays c6 which is the most difficult move in this position I actually have a fantastic move which is rook takes c6 which is a really difficult move to spot and truth to be told I don't know if I would have spotted it I want to believe that I would but the idea here is that after takes and takes this rook is so off place that actually these pawns are stronger than the rook and I think this is beautiful but fortunately this didn't happen she played rook c3 I took the pawn with check and now I play the move c5 and now I had extra time and I you know run around and I didn't have to stress about the time anymore now after I had run around a little bit I went to the bathroom picked up some drink and you know I kind of took a mental rest because it had been so high pressure for so long she went for the move rook c4 and when I went back to the board and saw this move I thought okay now there's something going on as I spent some time thinking and I was calculating all kinds of different things but then I thought wait a second there's actually a forcing winning line which is beautiful which is taking this pawn and now the idea is that she cannot take here because I will promote and when she picks up one of these pawns I have only one winning move but it's a very winning move which is rook c8 why because there's no way now of preventing this d pawn from promoting and this is the only winning move now if I do something like d7 then the king will go to e7 and now this is a draw so that's why it's important that I put my rook on the square it has to go to before I push this pawn and now after rook c8 she was shocked when I played this move she kind of you know did like this with her face I don't think she had seen it she checked me she went back but now there was nothing that could stop my pawn and after rook h8 she resigned and so I won this game and I felt so happy especially because I had taken that position of pushing for the win instead of taking the draw to be fair the only reason I would take the draw was because there's a team competition and obviously I don't want to put my team at any risk I want to try to perform as well as possible for the team but I could really feel like I felt comfortable in this end game and I wanted to play the game out and I'm really happy and proud that I did because I was able to win this game I was able to win this end game and even if my opening ended up being terrible I ended up playing at like 96.3 accuracy which is which is amazing I'm so happy so somehow I play better when I'm low on time than when I have a lot of time but yeah both the cramlings won today in the team and then Ina Agris and um La Vilnia who's playing on board four uh they drew which meant that we won today 3-1 and I'm really happy that we did that tomorrow we're probably facing a stronger team but let's bring it on let's go I hope that you enjoy the recap and I hope that you're enjoying watching all of the streams and videos from the Olympiad thank you so much for rooting for me and I'm gonna finish off with some words for my beautiful dad dad are you happy I'm very happy 3-1 and tomorrow we'll probably face someone strong right I think I think I'm not sure but I think so we will see