Exciting news - I am barely more than a week behind on the blog! Last Monday, on the 2nd April, I was on board 7 for Castles in our final league match of the season, away to Kingston I. Though our team was unusually strong (at least to judge by my barely making the team!), our opponents solidly outgraded us: 179-190, 176-193, 167-191, 159-173, 157-152 (they needed a sub), 146-170, 144-167, 93-165. My pairing brought together, by an irrelevant quirk, the only two left-handed people in the match, as I played the 167-graded Peter Roche.
I recalled from a crazy game he played against my other club, Wallington, that he likes to sacrifice pawns in the opening. He did it again here (only 1 rather than 3, however!) and although the computer is happy with my position for most of the game, I would have to defend forever if not for a rather generous acceptance of a draw offer:
As I've said before, the time limit of 30 moves in 1 hour with a 20-minute quickplay finish is deceptively quick, so there is certainly an argument for gambit play to tie one's opponent to nursing an extra pawn for a while. My centralised King annoyed me, as did his strong dark-squared Bishop, such that I didn't mind inadvertently surrendering my extra pawn after 23... a6?!; at least I got a way to exchanges. From an opening perspective, it wasn't really a success, and the underlying concept of 6. Be3!? seems sound enough (although I will stand by 6. Bd2; white gets a big attack there too so is it really necessary to give up even a pawn...?)
The match is technically undecided thanks to some very good performances and a shock win on the bottom board despite being outgraded by 72 (!) points - DDD?LLDW - but the adjudicated game on board 4 will only be won by a miracle, so it looks as though we will narrowly lose. We can still be proud of our performance, I think. Indeed, I think our best performance of the season was a 4.5-5.5 loss in the knock-out competition in September, when we were similarly outgraded.
The very next day, I played my final Surrey League game of the season.
No comments:
Post a Comment