Chess Fans Castle

[JoshLilly]

Again, I am not a serious player but I have read that the skill of Grandmasters is not so much in calculating permutations of moves (which are too large for a human to grasp) but in their encyclopedic knowledge of past games and matching current positions to past solutions - so that their decision tree is much narrower than a less skilled player. 

Pattern recognition is a huge factor. However, their calculation skills and strategic assessments are extreme. All Grandmasters are good at all things in chess, even their weakest point is extremely strong by universal standards. Candidate move selection is one of their best assets, though, but it's not all due to pattern recognition, since new patterns can (and do) arise. There are also a lot of GMs, especially young ones, who have inferior encyclopedic knowledge. Some, like young US GM Hiraku Nakamura, openly spurn studying past games, and prefer to use computers to discover odd opening attempts, and play a high-calculation game. There's a friend of mine who far outstrips certain GMs and many IMs in this regard, but he is weaker than they are all told due to other considerations. There are many cases where GMs will defer to weaker, experienced (usually older), players who have superior internal "databases" of patterns and games, but the GM would still trounce them game after game.

This is why a Grandmaster would beat any of us from any position, even one you create that has never before existed (this taking into account that one side can, in this position, win against the other). While non-chess folks over-estimate and over-emphasize their calculation, it is indeed very real and very powerful, especially with some players like Karpov, Kasparov, Shirov, Kramnik, J.Polgar, and so on. There are some real monstrous calculation machines out there with human bodies.

[ChamberNut]

Unfortunately, what you're describing with the 7-move loss doesn't give me quite enough information.

I was mistaken.  It was a 9-move loss (not that it makes it any better ).  Here was the scoring:

1. e4, e5

2. Nf3, f6

3. Nxe5, fxe5

4. Qh5+, g6

5. Qxe5+, Be7

6. Qxh8, Kf7

7. Bc4+, Ke8

8. Qxg8+, Bf8

9. Qf7#

[JoshLilly]

You were playing something known as the Damiano Defence, which is considered to be unplayable in an objective sense. However, some players - even relatively strong ones - will sometimes use it, hoping that its very reputation will result in people they face not studying it at all out of dismissiveness. You had to not take the Knight with 3...fxe5, which is the most infamous book trap in that opening. You have to play 3...Qe7 instead, but Black is still much worse in this opening. White will retreat the Knight somewhere, and White can then play 4...Qxe4+ 5.Be2. Notice that Black now has only the Queen developed off its original square, while White has a Knight on f3 and a Bishop on e2 and is already prepared to castle!

The opening is named for a Portuguese player named Damiano, who would be very upset by the naming. He wrote about it only to show how it was unusable, and now his name is forever attached to it!

[ChamberNut]

You had to not take the Knight with 3...fxe5, which is the most infamous book trap in that opening.

Yes, that's what sealed my fate.