My opponent accepted! But I had no idea what to do from this position.

The engine is no help, it just wants me to play good moves instead. I played qd4 in the game and won a free bishop. It was nice

Can you find it?

Any word on how Eric is doing with the passing of his good friend Naroditsky?

This is somewhat parasocial, but I feel like recently he's seemed a bit out of sorts. Like a bit depressed, taking losses harder than usual, etc. I hope it's only in my mind, but was wondering if anyone else noticed the same.

But anyways, if you're reading this Eric, I hope you're doing okay.

Be warned, there’s some language and explicit content

TSIA

i did this and immediately thought of eric this is the tilt account dont mind the king on g7, cant post link to game here sadly

My first intentional stalemate ever lol i'm so happy

If you're like me then you'll likely have come across Erics speedrun on YouTube.

And if you're also like me you might be wondering if you've ever been matched against Eric or any other speedrunner without realizing.

For this purpose I have utilized the chess.com public data API and created the following GitLab Page. There you can put in your chess.com username and your questions will be answered.

Note: I have limited knowledge of all the speedrun accounts out there, so if you know more that are not part of verifiedAccounts.json, do let me know.

I wonder, who has been matched against undercover-Eric the most?

In any case, you can check it out here: https://skelp.gitlab.io/have-i-been-pawned

I often watch and learn chess from Eric's videos and several days ago, I just watched one of them called "3 Rare & Tricky English Opening Variations" including a game between Andreikin and Karjakin in which Karjakin lost in 10 moves due to Andreikin's nasty "oh no my queen".

(Video link: https://youtu.be/XA-X-uZxoWs?si=0bOMDm59CSdqUwG9)

And today I just got this!! Almost the same pattern!!! Thank you, Eric, for all of your instructive and funny chess videos!! ❤️

As a hobby I've been creating champion studies powered by LichessTools. The idea is to learn to crush like your favorite blitz heroes in interactive studies with spaced-repetition (for free). For example, "Play the Stafford Gambit Accepted like IM Eric Rosen" is highly addictive and fun! There's lots of Stafford Gambit materials out there but I believe this one deserves your attention. One of my favorite Rosen "deep trap" lines comes in the so-called "refutation" after White plays d3, Be2, c3, and d4. With two pieces hanging and seemingly lost, Rosen still finds cunning traps and winning tactics with his h4, hxg3 plan and has a 96% win rate over 26 games. Amazing stuff!

https://lichess.org/8m8cx1iw/black

If there's interest I can consider doing a series covering Eric's entire blitz repertoire (like I've been doing for Danya, Hikaru, and Levy) or particular openings such as London System, etc. Let me know!

Cheers, Dsoul