I was backing up my drive to switch laptops recently and I came across a screengrab of a chess game I played against Hikaru Nakamura. This was in January 2020, back when he had yet to blow up into a giant streamer. As I recall, I was one of a handful of subscribers on his Twitch channel. He would occasionally play his subscribers on stream, and this was my lucky day. Here’s the footage from his stream.



He hits me with the Bongcloud. I try to attack him, and we get into a pretty interesting middlegame, where he sacs an exchange for an attack on my king. He gets into a spot of trouble and has to take a break from expounding on his investment strategy to look at the game. He gambles and goes for a trick. Remarkably, I find the right counter and am at +3 for a couple moves! Until I panic and crumble. I’ve annotated the game below.

Can’t complain - that went as well as it could’ve gone. Here’s what chess.com thought of the game.

review


I got to play him a second time a couple months later, though that game was pretty one-sided.


Hikaru’s been my favorite chess player for a decade now! I actually got to meet him at a blitz tournament in Paris in 2016.

selfie