Madmen, a Grandmaster and a breakthrough

 This post concerns the 7-round blitz tournament that I played in at CCF yesterday. Now, I said in the last post that I wouldn't be recording the games, the implicit message being that you wouldn't be seeing how I got on. And indeed, I did not record. However, when I got home after the tournament, I was able to recall one of the games fully. Pleased with this, I soon finished another, and another... it didn't take too long for me to fully note down 5 of the 7 games, and most of a sixth. Eventually I was given the score of my other game by my opponent, who was recording.

 It is in part as a momento of this small triumph that I present all seven games below, but also partly because I had a good tournament. A disclaimer though - the time control was 8 minutes + 2 seconds per move. Hence mistakes are not just likely, they are all-but guaranteed! But complete carnage is also commonplace, and the rapidplay grades I quote often turn out to be completely meaningless. So sit back and enjoy...

 If you read my last post carefully, the alarm bells should have been set off by the last sentence of the first paragraph in this one. And rightly so, for in the first round my placement in the middle of the seeding meant I played on the wrong side of board 1, against Grandmaster Bogdan Lalic. Whilst it is no exaggeration to say that he has a reputation as quite possibility the most drawish player in the world, he is of course an extremely strong player - 2600 Elo at his peak, this is someone who has played on board 1 for Croatia in two Olympiads, beating both Polgar and Shirov in the 1996 edition. His son Peter was, until our year group left a few months ago, Sutton Grammar's top board and a 200+ player himself. But enough grandstanding - I played a Benko Gambit, had a good game but made a tactical mistake and lost in geometrically improbable style:

 So from one extreme to the other - from top board against a GM to penultimate board against Paul Braithwaite, whose rapid grade is 36. He is somewhat stronger at slowplay, perhaps because he feels he has the time to check over his moves more thoroughly. Whatever the case, this game was yet another case of one mistake throwing off someone's equilibrium and leading to more, resulting in an abrupt conclusion. At least I got in the King's Gambit I had pledged to play beforehand:
 

Round 3 was something of a damp squib, truth be told. I played Paul Jackson (153), an opponent I remember primarily for the powerful and aggressive fashion in which he took apart a King's Indian Defence when I was a much weaker player two years ago. For both parties, this game was unusually dull, but by being alert when an opportunity presented itself, I scored a notable upset:

 For the middle round, I was back to battling improbable odds against Open-strength players as black. In this case, I played Tumen Buyandalai (189) but I think it's fair to say I came quite close to holding a draw. White's play did not convince, but it's often the case that the stronger player prevails solely on the basis of two or three moves, and so it proves here, although I'm afraid that this is the game that I couldn't quite finish off mentally:

 

 And now the breakthrough mentioned in the title. Once again, I was playing Alex Hardwick. Right back to our first meeting, I've had the annoying habit of establishing clearly better, nay, winning, positions only to inexplicably let him off with a draw, and I once even lost. This time, after an opening gift to rival our 4. f3!? Nimzo-Indian encounter at the UKCC Gigafinal, I finally converted a full point. Thankfully I got a lift home again anyway:
 

 Part of the reason I am not a fan of single-section Opens at anything other than blitz speed is that it is very easy to end up yo-yoing between players graded either far higher or far lower than oneself. Here I played Robin Haldane - a round late, as due to an incorrectly reported result I'd originally been put against him in the previous round. In my opinion, this is the only game in which I was comprehensively outplayed, including the loss to GM Lalic in the first round!

 On the rare occasions when I go into the last round of a tournament vying for a prize, I usually have a tough pairing to go with it. Here, I was in contention for a £10 grading prize, and it was an exception - I played a junior, Thomas West, of ECF grade 68. But in my world nothing is easy, and whilst I did succeed in making sure it was the only one of my games that white didn't win, I made things a lot harder than they needed to be:
 

 You may well query the point of analysing blitz games, even if I have tried to be less thorough than for games at slower speeds. They are FIDE-rated blitz games, however, so have at least a little worth. And winning my entry fee back is always newsworthy! It is not often that a 120 gets to play a GM outside of a simul either - I've now had that privilege twice, and I think I've given a good account of myself both times. Blitz games tend to be wild affairs indeed, and whilst these are perhaps a little on the tame side, relatively speaking, I hope the reader finds them interesting nonetheless.