This final round game put an end to my bad run as Black, thanks to an opening shock that was the proximate cause of my opponent overlooking an unusual knight fork. I've been the victim of such assumptions in the opening phase myself, in which I don't look for tactics (or overlook them) because of the mental presumption that they are not possible so early in the game. Here, the 3...dxc4 line in the Slav after 3. Nc3 is not all that unusual, but most people play 3...Nf6 and I've repeatedly seen surprise on my opponent's faces at the Class level.
Despite being down major material, my opponent still was up for the fight, so I focused my strategy on eliminating any possible counterplay; perhaps some thanks are due to previous study of Petrosian's games. This included giving back some of the material to eliminate White's strongly placed knight, a useful counter-example to some of my past too-materialist thinking, and the decision was fully validated by the engine. Thinking about the board situation in this type of dynamic (rather than static) fashion is what I need to do more.
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