On Wednesday, I played two games in Castles' all-play-all rapidplay tournament, both of which were against the other two people who captain teams for that club. For the first of them, I had white against Martin Bibby, who runs our team in the CCF Longplay Superleague. Though his rapidplay grade is modest, the 120 he has for slowplay is rather more indicative of his strength, and he has been improving of late.
This game nicely illustrates the Joshua Waitzkin concept of the 'downward spiral' - one player is disheartened by a mistake or turn of events, and they continue to make mistakes and run their position quickly downhill. After a dozen or so moves it was obvious that I had a dominating position, but I let him wriggle free with a clever move, and quickly collapsed from won to lost after that.
Incidentally, you may have noticed that I have recently discovered the ability to adjust the border width on this blog, so I no longer need to resort to ugly 125%-width boards for the pieces to be reasonably-sized. Anyway, I could say that I wasn't myself in this game, and my slow play might back it up, but that would do an injustice to my opponent, who played well to hang on and found a strong practical resource in 14... c5! Once the position was simplified, he convincingly outplayed me, also in the unrecorded moves that followed 21... Bxa1 (although of course, that wasn't hard with so much extra material.)
Nonetheless, I was happy with the early moves, where black's wet approach to the game allowed me to build a winning position surprisingly quickly. The second game of the evening was to be a role reversal, where my opponent outplayed me early on only be denied a win by a narrow endgame hold.
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