Swindles 3

These games showcase situations where my opponent gets something wrong. They're only loosely definable as 'swindles' since I didn't have much to do with them other than taking advantage of the unexpected error - but they do provide some of the most entertaining late-game turnarounds.

Ushering the pawn... but forgetting the pawn

White's king was eager to support his pawn to promotion here but got a bit carried away and forgot to take the pawn with him.

Forgetting the piece on the other side of the board

Here the opponent played Qb7+ and premoved Rc8 mate, not realising I didn't have to move my king after the first check. The blocking piece was a long way away to be fair.

Trying to be clever

Here the opponent can promote to a queen, let me capture, then capture my pawn: draw. Or they can capture my pawn and then I'll capture theirs: draw. I think they chose the first option, but decided on a knight instead of a queen to be funny. Of course, the knight doesn't have to be captured...

Not knowing how to under-promote

This is a rare situation where the opponent can only win by underpromoting to a rook because a queen is stalemate. The timings showed they spent over 5 seconds on this promotion, and still promoted to queen anyway. Maybe they had auto-queen turned on.

Dull draw... or is it?

In this drawn opposite-coloured bishops endgame, the kings can pretty much just move around randomly and nothing should happen, right? I just moved aimlessly for long enough, hoping they would go to d3 at some point... allowing a winning discovered check.

Confusing double bishop barrier

Here the two bishops create an invisible diagonal barrier across the board. White wants to cross over to support their pawn to promote. They can't enter my bishop's attack line of course, but they didn't realise they couldn't block their own bishop either (because it is covering my pawn promotion). As soon as they do, I promote and win the game.

Mis-click disaster

This is possibly the worst mis-click ever. Mate in one becomes giving up a queen.

Flexing underpromoter

They stalemated me, obviously.

We all have games like this

I'm just a whole rook down for no compensation here, but somehow turned it around. Endings that turn out like this are quite common at lower levels, so be reassured that it sometimes happens at the 2200 level too.

KQ v KQ

Well, this is a clear draw. But let's give some checks and see what happens...

Disconnecting on tilt and missing the draw

This person had been winning all game, then struggled to parry all my queen checks so were probably thinking they'd thrown the win away into a draw - but then they disconnected after my last move. I'm pretty sure they saw Kh1 would be met with Qf1 mate, and Kh3 would be met with Qf1+ Kh4 g5 mate, so they'd actually now be losing the game. But they missed that I had no win after Kg1.

And finally... the only move that hangs mate in one

Oops.