A game of two halves

 After my first graded longplay game for nearly two months, for the second round I was drawn to play black against the junior player Prashast Vir (140 ECF / 1646 Elo.) Although I am now the higher graded player, in the majority of our (mainly non-tournament) games, he has come out on top.

 As the title of this post suggests, I think this game can be seen in two parts, which although not of exactly equal length are split at about half-way through the game. After his experiment in a theoretically crucial line of the Najdorf Sicilian backfired, I acquired a position which he described as "positionally crushing" afterwards. Whilst I maintained a good game for a while, by the second half of the game I had contrived to squander this advantage, and in the second half of the game was completely outplayed from a roughly equal position. Thus I was left to rue his deflated FIDE rating:

 This loss was a shame, since the state of play after 14... d5 pretty much amounts to a dream position for black out of this opening! White's Queenside pieces have been driven to passivity, the problem of the backward d-pawn has been solved, and ...a5-a4 beginning a powerful assault on the King is an obvious plan. According to the computer, if I had then continued 15... Nfd7 instead of ...Ne8?!, I would be close to wrapping up the game there and then. I was still better for a little while, but breaking up my own centre and trading Queens were both bad ideas, and I soon found myself standing worse. 29... Rh8! was my last chance to maintain a playable game, and once I overlooked it, the rest was a formality, with Vir playing very incisively to pick up the point.

 Still, I told myself, there was still time to catch up... and time was a resource I needed very little of for my round 3 game.