Dark square blues

 For round 2, I was down to board 2 - one of our strongest players was available for the second round only, so in he went on board 1, which at least allowed our grade total to creep over 1000; every team in every match previously, including Castles, had exceeded that amount comfortably, and it felt slightly wrong to be relying so blatantly on grade handicap. I'm not sure how well the handicap worked, for the two teams who consistently approached the grading limit (1400) are the two duking it out to win the competition. Indeed, even on board 2 I was now playing a 178, Julien Shepley, who is quite well-known in the local area. As befits the gap in experience, I was strategically outplayed such that my game eventually collapsed like the proverbial house of cards:

 As I said in the title, I suffered from terrible dark-square blues eventually (and indeed, the dark squares in the flash viewer are blue! Sorry...) after I felt obliged to trade off my dark-squared Bishop for a Knight. My Queenside pawns in particular were a liability after they were fixed by b5 and a4. Following the loss of concentration that allowed 32. Qxb6 things rapidly fell apart, but even after the better 31... Qc5 things are tough; without using an engine, a plan for white in the variation I gave there of Ba3-d6-c7xb6xa7 looks tough to meet, especially as his other Bishop cuts across the position as well. This game demonstrated an obvious gulf in class that I can sometimes bridge in slowplay games, but not rapidplay.

 As this was a team match, it must be considered that my games are overshadowed by the fact of our rather undeserved 1-7 'victory' after the win on time with K+P vs. K+Q+lots. Just imagine if we had a 200+ player on board 1 - we could win a lot of matches like this! (In fact, we do have a 201, but circumstances have conspired to make him unavailable for every match this season. But these things happen.) But the possibility is an extreme situation and overall the competition was good fun, a sentiment I believe to be shared by the other teams. Captaining a team in an adult evening league was challenging, and became difficult towards the end of the season, but a final record of P6 W2 D1 L3 was satisfactory, and we might even take 3rd place.

 But now (or, whenever I get the next game annotated) back to real chess, and a 4 hour + time control game...