This is my game against Scott Faust (1488) at the Universal Spring Swiss Tournament on Nov. 2-4.  I had the black pieces.

1. c4 d6.  Although I had never played Scott before, I knew he was going to play the English from seeing him reading the English Opening book between rounds and watching one of his previous games.  My plan was to transpose him into the King's Indian to see if it got him out of his comfort zone.  This was simple plan for me because I have been playing the Modern opening on almost all my games where I had black. 

2. d4 Nf6 3. Nc3 g6 4. e4 Bg7 5. h3 o-o 6. Bd3 c5 7. d5 a6?    White played d5 really fast here.  I was surprised because I have played numerous games where I thought d5 was a mistake by white, blocking his light-square bishop and opening the door for black to attack c4 and the queen-side.  However, my move 7 was not very inspired, and I think I could have played more actively and tried to take the momentum.  I was hoping to follow with b5, but this was too far off.

8. Be3 Nfd7.  I wanted to take advantage that his light-square bishop was blocked, and I thought I could continue to lock it down with Ne5.  I had the right idea, but this was not the way to do this.  Now it is obvious to me that f4 not only forces my knight away, forces me back to d7 or to trade for his bad bishop.

9. Qd2 Qb6 10. Nge2 Ne5 11. o-o Nxd3.  I had a tough choice here.  I realized after the fact that my knight at e5 was not going to be able to block his light-squared bishop after white plays f4, so when he played Nge2, I saw that I had a chance to win the b-pawn if I traded my knight for his bishop at d3.  It took me a long time to come to this decision because I had to make sure that I could extract my queen after I took the pawn.  I saw that he had Rb1 followed by Rb3, but I saw that I could move my queen safely to a3 then a5 and then retreat back from there.  What I did not calculate was how white might use his advanced rook on the now open b-file against me.

12. Qxd3 Qxb2 13. Rb1 Qa5 14. Rb3 Qa5 15. Rfb1 Qc7.  I did not see this move back on move 11, but I saw that I could defend this easily.  My concern was how to unbottle my position quickly now that I had given white so much tempo to develop an attack.

16. Qd2 Re8.  I knew that white's plan was to trade bishops at g7.  I wasn't sure if I wanted that or not.  By playing Re8, I was giving myself a chance t0 play Bh8 if I wanted to save my bishop.  But that presented other problems, since now I would have no other way to extract the bishop at h6.

 17.Bh6 Nd7.  I decided to use the tempo to unbottle my queen-side.

18. Bxg7 Kxg7 19. f4 Rb8 20. Ng3 Nf6 21. Qf2 e6.  This was the start of my plan to take control of the queen side.  My plan was to challenge the pawn structure which is now weak at c4.  However, I under estimated white's attacking chances after the next move.

22. Rf1 exd5 23. Nxd5 Nxd5.  This move caught me by surprise.  Why would white force a trade while down a piece?  I did not notice that it opened up the a1-h8 diagonal that his queen could use to gain a tempo by checking my king.

24. exd5 Kg8?  I was too cautious here.  I had the initiative, and I gave it back to white by making this passive move.  Part of my indecision here is that I had no good way to deal with 25. f5 ..., except maybe 24. ... f5, which blocks in my bishop.  In retrospect, 24. ... f5 would have been better than Kg8.

25. f5 Re5 26. Re3! Rxe3 27. Qxe3 Bxf5??  Up to this point, I think the game was fairly even, but white has all the attacking chances, although black has good chances to draw.  This blunder was so terrible, I could have probably resigned after I played it.  My thought was that I could not stop f6 followed by Qf4, Qh6, Qg7#.  I did not see that I could have simply played Qe7 and Qf8 to stop the attack (and still protecting the d6 pawn).  Even though I probably had little chances for a win after these moves, I could have still held on for an end game, where I had at least even chances.  I'm up a pawn, remember?  The rest was well played by white.

28. Nxf5 gxf5 29. Qg5+ Kf8 30. Qh3+ Kg8 31. Rxf5 f6? 32. Qxf6 1-0.

After running this game through ChessMaster 10, I see that the game was pretty much even right up to move 27.  If I could have had a little more time to analyze the position, maybe I could have seen how to stop the mate threat without making this blunder and reached an end game in my favor.  my mental error was that I was not looking to get to an end game.  I could only see that I had to stop checkmate, and that I had no attacking chances.  What are your thoughts about this game?