French Defense Masterclass: Crushing a 2600+ GM

Comments on https://lichess.org/@/lizard1/blog/french-defense-masterclass-crushing-a-2600-gm/WLDTDxeO

Nice and instructive game, but knowing more about the mysterious Black player would be nice.
Personally I enjoy much more the games of GM aspiringstar, who has verified his title and hasn't closed the account after several months. Title verification isn't obligatory, but it's likely to bring one more respect among the opponents. The same applies to staying there for years.

It is an interesting game, but it is a blitz game only, and the mysterious black player has closed its account.

It seems the rook lift 10 Rh3? is pointless as black is going to castle O-O-O. Better was 10 Qg3.
The decisive mistake was 16 Kg1? White had to use square g1 to re-route his knight: 16 Ng1.

Here is a clean white win in this variation

The first World Championship game Gukesh-Ding Liren is a key example of the French Defense winning.

https://lichess.org/@/SwitzerlandChair Doesn’t have an account anymore

@ILikeBlitz @tpr

Thanks for the comments, I actually wasn’t aware that SwitzerlandChair had closed the account. I simply came across this game randomly on Lichess TV (just like most games I cover in my blog), and at the time it looked like a very active account (I believe 10k+ games), so the closure must be quite recent.

I shared this game mainly because of its educational aspect, and I believe the potentially mysterious nature of Black's player does not diminish the instructive value of the game, and it's sill a very clean illustration of typical French Defense ideas: especially the sequence of breaks (...f6, ...e5, ...d4, ...g5) and how quickly the position can flip if White loses the thread.

And yes, White's play could definitely be improved with moves like Qg3 with idea of playing h5+f4, or rerouting with Ng1, both of which are very sensible, and I wanted to mention those in the blog post, but I keep being accused of making my blog posts too long, so I'm trying to slim down wherever I can.

And I’ll 100% keep covering more games from aspiringstar, those are always a goldmine for instructive lessons.

@Lizard1 said ^

Thanks for the comments, I actually wasn’t aware that SwitzerlandChair had closed the account. I simply came across this game randomly on Lichess TV (just like most games I cover in my blog), and at the time it looked like a very active account (I believe 10k+ games), so the closure must be quite recent.

You are correct. Googling the account name shows some cached information and says 14464 games. The most recent web archive of the account says 13,995 games as of Mar 11 2026.

this is a post clearly written by chatGPT

The writing style screams chatGPT