Below is my last game from the club tournament. I lost the game after blundering in the middlegame. But I don’t post it here because of it. I would like to share with you a moment which is known probably to each chess player.

I call the moment “prejudice in favour of a bad idea“.

We played quite normal Ruy Lopez. It was quiet variant, white developed his pieces in classical way. But what happend to my mind when I was thinking about my 16th move? I calculated a bishop’s sacrifice on h6 for about 40 minutes!

Of course, I saw the simply refutation like 16…. gxh6 17.Nhf5 Qe6! And what is worse. I knew that the sacrifice can be hardly correct as black didn’t make any bad moves. But the idea of the sacriface was so sticky to my mind that I lost a lot of time there. Which was needed later and the lack of time resulted in my blunder in the 22nd move.

This game is a clear example what a chess player should avoid to. Thinking about lines which are clearly bad and hoping he will find there something positive. Next time, once I will find a refutation of the variant, I will leave the variant and start to calculate about another one. Hopefully better one ;)

White to move.