Game 1: my first rapid game, and what to do when your opponent brings the queen out early

My first rated rapid game on Chess.com was on January 10, 2024: White against mohammad1347reza (488), with my rating at 631, fifteen minutes each plus ten seconds a move. My opponent moved his queen three times in his first five moves, and I won by checkmate on move 15. Looking back with Stockfish, the game is a small lesson in what to do when your opponent brings the queen out early: develop your pieces, and don't spend moves chasing the queen with pawns. I did the opposite at first, and got away with it.

This is the first story of my journey from 631 to 1385. The whole game is public on Chess.com, and every evaluation below comes from the engine analysis of that game. Evaluations are always from White's side: +1.00 means White is about a pawn better.

The game in numbers

The game took about five minutes of real time. It started at 16:44 UTC and ended at 16:49. I finished with 14:06 on my clock, so I wasn't short of time: I simply didn't use it. Chess.com's own review gave me 82.1% accuracy; the Stockfish analysis I use for this series gave 91.9%. Both are high, and both say more about my opponent's mistakes than about my play.

What to do when your opponent brings the queen out early

The opening went 1.d4 d5 2.c4 dxc4 3.e3, and then my opponent played 3...Qd5. A queen in the middle of the board this early looks scary, but it is usually a target: every time you develop a piece that attacks it, the queen has to move again, and the other side loses time. Stockfish called 3...Qd5 an inaccuracy (from +0.28 to +1.16). After 4.Nc3 the queen moved again, to e6, and that was another inaccuracy (to +2.37). Four moves in, I was already clearly better without having done anything clever.

Then I did something that felt clever. I pushed my d-pawn to d5 to kick the queen a third time.

r n b . k b n r
p p p . p p p p
. . . . q . . .
. . . . . . . .
. . p P . . . .
. . N . P . . .
P P . . . P P P
R . B Q K B N R

Stockfish marked 5.d5 as my one mistake of the game: the evaluation fell from +2.37 to +1.03. The engine's move is the quiet knight move to f3. Its line (the engine's idea, not what happened in the game) was 5.Nf3 a6 6.Ne5 b5 7.a4. The pawn push did attack the queen, but the queen just stepped back to d6, still active, and I had used a move on a pawn instead of bringing out a piece.

The interesting part is that the engine kept asking for the same move. On move 6 it preferred Nf3 again before recapturing the pawn on c4. On move 7, after my opponent put his knight on the edge with 6...Na6 (a mistake, to +2.74), the best move was once more Nf3. I played 7.a3 instead, which takes the b4 square away from the knight on a6, and the engine flagged it as an inaccuracy (down to +1.67). The knight from g1 finally reached f3 on move 12, when the game was already decided.

I don't have notes from that afternoon, so I won't pretend to remember what I was thinking. What the moves show is a pattern I'd see again many times: I reacted to what my opponent was doing (the queen, the knight on a6) instead of finishing my own development.

The bishop that attacked my queen

On move 7 my opponent played the move that decided the game. He brought his bishop to g4, where it attacked my queen on d1.

r . b . k b n r
p p p . p p p p
n . . q . . . .
. . . P . . . .
. . B . . . . .
P . N . P . . .
. P . . . P P P
R . B Q K . N R

An attack on the queen is only a threat if the attacking piece is safe. Nothing defended the bishop on g4, and the diagonal from d1 to g4 was open, so my queen simply took it. Stockfish calls 7...Bg4 a blunder: from +1.67 to +8.67. The engine's move for Black was 7...e6, and even then White stays clearly better (its line: 7...e6 8.e4 exd5 9.exd5 Be7). My reply, 8.Qxg4, was the engine's best move too. It was the easiest decision of the game: a free piece.

From there I was a bishop up. Honestly, the rest wasn't pretty. My own queen kept moving: Qd4 on move 9, Qh4 on move 10, Qg3 on move 13. None of those was the engine's first choice (it preferred Qe2 on move 9 and a bishop check, Bb5+, on move 10), but the evaluation stayed between +6 and +9 the whole time. When you are a piece up against an opponent who is still undeveloped, a few slow moves don't change the result. They do change how fast the game ends.

The mate on g7

On move 14 I played my bishop to h6. Together with my queen on g3, it lined up on the pawn on g7, next to the black king: the queen threatened to take it with checkmate, because the bishop would protect the queen there. Stockfish's own preference on that move was a knight move to h4 (+8.97 before my move, +8.78 after), so even my final attack wasn't the most precise. But it set a direct question, and my opponent didn't answer it.

r . . . . r k .
p p p n b . p p
n . . q . p . B
. . . P p . . .
. . B . P . . .
P . N . . N Q .
. P . . . P P P
R . . . K . . R

He played 14...Nb6, which attacked my bishop on c4 (it had no defender), and I played 15.Qxg7, checkmate. The engine's defence was 14...Rf7: the rook steps next to the g7 pawn and protects it. White would still be completely winning, but there would be a game left to play.

The lesson from game 1

Two simple ideas come out of this game, one for each side of the board.

1. When your opponent brings the queen out early, develop, don't chase. Stockfish wanted the same knight move on moves 5, 6 and 7. Each piece you develop is a piece that might attack the queen later with gain of time; each pawn you push to kick it is a move your pieces don't get. Chasing the queen with a pawn cost me more than half of my advantage in one move.
2. Before reacting to an attack on your queen, check if the attacker is defended. My opponent's bishop on g4 attacked my queen and lost the game, because my queen could take it. And before any move of your own, ask what your opponent threatens: the mate on g7 was one move away, and a knight attack on my bishop didn't stop it.

The second idea, checking what the opponent can do back, turned out to be the lesson of my whole first week. I wrote about it in the week 1 diary, where three moments from games #3, #4 and #5 all have the same shape.

What came after

I started game #2 four minutes after this one ended, and the rating Chess.com shows for me in that game is 781, 150 points above the 631 of game #1. That story, and the first time I failed to punish my opponent's blunders, is in Reaching 700. By the end of that first week I had played 30 games and was at 875.

If you want to look at your own first games like this, without reading engine numbers, the explanations come in plain words when you connect Chess Coach to Claude. And if you've ever been frustrated that a review shows a "best move" without saying why, I wrote about that in why Chess.com's game review doesn't explain moves.