Milestone: 1600 on Lichess Rapid

As a general rule, I avoid playing chess during the week on Chess.com. Experience has demonstrated there is a causal relationship between hours of sleep and play performance, and during the week it's rare that I get the recommended daily allowance of eight hours' sleep per night. Where I go to satisfy my obsession instead is Lichess. I play 3- and 5-minute blitz games on the toilet at work and 10-minute rapid games later in the day when the appetite for chess demands it.

This afternoon I was all alone in the school after having corrected a pile of grade seven notebooks when I felt the urge for a rapid game. The Lichess server matched me with an opponent rated 1591, and he opened with e4. I replied with e6, he brought his knight out to f3, and I played c6 hoping to avoid the dreaded Exchange Variation of the French Defense. Alas, on move 5 he initiated an exchange of pawns on the d-file and followed that up with a check from his queen on e2:

Move 6

The engine calls Qe2+ an inaccuracy, but it throws me off every time. In this instance I blocked with my dark-squared bishop instead of the light-squared one, left my c-pawn hanging, and was down a pawn the next move.

There was no profound lesson to be learned from this game. My opponent got careless, missed a discovered check that came with an attack on his queen, and resigned after move 12. On a day I surrendered eleven blitz points and dipped back below 1300, I increased my rapid rating to an all-time high of 1605.

Move 12