“I won a pawn, but misplayed the position and was totally busted. Then he missed a knight fork and I had won the game before hanging my queen. So we agreed to a draw.” — Every chess player at least once
It’s a dirty little secret we’re not supposed to discuss, but the games you tend to see in instruction books, brilliancy anthologies and (ahem) newspaper columns don’t always accurately reflect chess as it is actually played by the vast majority of us. Like a TV sitcom that wraps up a major life crisis in 22 tidy minutes, your typical chess annotator is looking for games with an intelligible opening, a logical development, a satisfying denouement and (at most) one improbable change of fortune.