A mixed bag on tournament restart

 Firstly, it should be noted that I received good news from my A-Level results last week, getting into my first-choice University. That is Bristol, and will give me a good supply of league games in the coming season, for their chess club is rather strong. And no, that wasn't why I applied there!

 Anyway, until October I am free to stop worrying about exam results and play some chess, which started on Saturday in the Sections For All 'A' event in CCF's annual Jessie Gilbert Celebration Festival. This tournament is FIDE-rated, and limited as U-2000, which translates as roughly U-170 by ECF grades. My rating at the moment, by the way, is 1772. Last year I had a good result by my standards of the time (see last post for one of the games), performing at 151 and winning a grading prize with 3.5/6. Best, I earned a FIDE part-rating of 1834 to get my first full rating.

 Since I was narrowly in the top half of the draw, I faced one of the lower seeds in round 1. That was Anantha Anilkumar Snr. (ECF 81; FIDE 1347) who is father to a junior of the same name whose grade is in the 140s. My preparation showed that he was pretty well booked-up - but the title of my very first game post on this blog was "Theory can only get you so far." This partly motivated my opening choice, but I haven't played it for a while anyway. By my standards, a month without playing any OTB games is a very long time indeed, and I hoped that this break hadn't robbed me of a competitive edge. Hence I went in not really knowing how I should expect to play...

 Ostensibly, this appears a very serene win, with white quickly gaining an advantage and energetically pushing the game to its natural conclusion in only 25 moves. Some of my play was quite strong - I was pleased that I was ready to discard the usual Grand Prix themes and play 13. e5!, which is when the game really started to turn my way. I also managed to visualise quite far at times, though usually only to figure out that the lines I was looking at weren't very good. On the other hand, I was quite lethargic in some ways - my calculation was rather erratic, which resulted in me rejecting the very tempting and also very strong 20. Rxf6!, for there I simply got overwhelmed by the large number of variations. Further, I got stuck in that annoying loop where one loses one's place in a variation, starts from the beginning, loses it again, starts it again, and so on ad infinitum. In part because of this, I used quite a lot of time - factoring in the Fischer increment, I used an hour for 25 moves, which could have been better.

 Overall though, this seems to have been a good workout ahead of the tougher trials to follow, for it was sharp, explosive and short - my kind of game!