Hit by a team-wide voodoo

 The Beaumont Cup match, Castles vs. Redhill II, was not a good one for those of us in the home team. We outgraded them solidly (183-177; 179-169; 176-152; 146-147; 144-126; 119-117; 93-109, 102-77) yet failed to win a single game, losing by an emphatic 1.5-6.5 (DLDLLLDL.) It's curious how there can be such consistent over-performance by one team in a match. The best explanation I've managed for Sutton Grammar generally producing better results in away matches is that our players are stuck in a minibus and so don't distract themselves with trivial friendly games and waste energy, but I doubt Redhill's players arrived in such a way!

 Whatever the case, there seemed to be a wave of strange play from which no board was safe, and given that I've been playing near to, sometimes above, a 150 level for some time now, it's fair to say that I was almost unrecognisable in this game, against the veteran 126-graded Roger Barnett:

 My initial reaction to this defeat, typically, was to blame my opening choice. But once I sat down to annotate it, I realised that really, my position out of the opening wasn't so bad. Indeed, for a little while I was somewhat better. That said, I have never been 100% convinced by the Budapest Gambit, so it's unlikely it will ever be more than an occasional surprise weapon as it has been hitherto. An opening where white emerges with more space and development, with little to compensate, doesn't appeal much to me.

 The real problem though was my dreadful middlegame - I was just so passive! Fear of one little possibility - the advance of his c-pawn to c5 - left my Bishops rather comically sitting on c8 and b8, and indeed by the end of the game they were still sat there doing nothing, likewise the a8 Rook. "Get the pieces out!" is a common piece of advice in all beginner books...  By contrast, white's attack exploded from nowhere, and after some further weak play by me in time trouble, even a trade of Queens did nothing to solve my difficulties. Only a few posts ago I preached the value of always keeping one's pieces active - perhaps I need to study my own blog more carefully!!

 So a depressing game and match, that left me annoyed at such a strange run of games with black. My next game did nothing to offset the annoyance at colour sequence...