Jim Tarjan’s win over Alex Shabalov from the Senior Championship

Jim Tarjan had a great result in the 2021 Senior Championship, and had a lot of great games along the way. One of his more instructive games is his win over Alex Shabalov with black in round 8.

I followed this game on chess24 in real time. But I wasn’t deeply analyzing the game in real time, I was just checking a web page on my phone and trying to reconcile my superficial impression of the position with the fluctuating engine evaluations from the web page. I added my impressions to Jim’s notes. Jim’s notes are marked “JT” in the annotations.