Made to order

 After a wobbly performance at Richmond, I had the best part of a week (a long rest by my standards!) before the next game, a school match at home to Whitgift. Thanks to the hard-fought victory at RGS Guildford 7 days prior ("Finally! Fortune smiles on me") we had recovered our momentum, and were beginning to tighten our grip on 2nd place in the top division. Whitgift are bottom of Division 1, but since their top 2 players are respectively the highest-graded junior in the country and a Major-strength player whose absence from our team I bemoaned in the very last post, they seemed to be equipped with just the weapons to cause an upset; we scraped past them on their home turf* by a very tight 3.5-2.5 near the beginning of the season, and we usually play better in away matches. This time, we had a player missing too.

 So the grade line-ups (ours first) were 192-230, 143-167, 129-131, 123-121, 125-122, 133-72. Sadly for Whitgift, they are often betrayed by their lack of depth, but it is worth noting that their board 4 was the very same Yang-Jian Zhou who convincingly duffed me up at RR99 5 days earlier. I did wonder if they might have changed their board order since October, but as it was I was called on to play the 131-graded Charan Maheswaran for a second time. I won the first game with a powerful display on the black side of a Sicilian Defence, presented in the notes below, and I was correct to guess that I would be required to repeat the trick to get a good result. After my traditional failure to call the toss, I got black. The stage was set for my first really good game in a while...:

 My prediction was right; with some strange results on both sides (DWWLWL), my victory proved just enough to give us another win; our season record is now P8 W5 D1 L2. As I mentioned at the end of my annotations, it did seem that the match was getting away from us - board 1 was drawn surprisingly quickly, but we squandered an advantage of 61 grading points on bottom board, had played a dodgy-looking piece sacrifice on board 5, and were losing from the get-go on 4. Whitgift's board 5 then blundered catastrophically just before I won on time, returning the score to 2.5-2.5. But board 2 was the centre of the action; our player quickly gained a commanding advantage in material, position and time against complacent opening preparation, but let it drift - things came down to a blitz finish with only a couple of minutes each, but nerves of steel (I couldn't even bear to watch!) enabled him to hold a very loose position together and win the ending.

 And before I go, the other reason I describe this game as "made to order". A couple of days before, a strong club team-mate I know who reads this blog (you know who you are!) had observed that "you're not really a natural tactician." Whilst I'm inclined to agree, I still have pride - 20... Rxc3! keeps my ego intact, and I followed it up nicely in the next two games.


* An amusing anecdote from that match. Whitgift is well-known for its sport (especially cricket.) When we arrived, our headmaster announced to a 6th-former on the gate "we're here for a chess match." The answer came back: "which pitch?"