Mad, bad and dangerous to know

 Following my game at Castles, I quickly dashed home, had dinner and almost immediately headed straight back out of the front door to get to Wallington CC (which, ironically, is within walking distance of Wilson's, but that's life...) in order to play in a simul.

 This simul (over 14 boards) was being given by Peter Lalic, who was in my year group at school and played top board for our 1st team. Last year he gave one over 11 boards at Ashtead Chess Club, with the additional challenge of clocks, and still scored +11 =0 -0 whilst having the spare mental capacity to fully recall all 11 games and post them on YouTube. So the pressure was on the Wallington contingent to beat that! With 4 players graded over 160, this looked to be a much sterner assignment for him, and so it proved.

 I have often likened Peter to Capablanca - he has immense natural talent (hardly difficult; his mother is a WGM and his father a GM!) excellent technique and fearsome ability in the endgame, but he also can be quite lazy; he dislikes opening theory, tries to prevent any tactics cropping up at all, and has a violent aversion to complicated positions. If you've read much of this blog, you will have realised that my playing style could scarcely be more different - hence the vast majority of our games are a fierce battle of wills to see who can impose their fingerprint on the position. On this occasion, I won that battle hands down, but the complications quickly mushroomed totally out of control:

 Of course, when one plays Musical Chairs with one's opening repertoire as often as Peter does, the risk of walking into a variation you don't know as well as you really ought to is greatly increased. It could be said that it's just bad luck to play an opening that I had revised all of my knowledge of the very previous day for totally unrelated reasons (I had prepared only for the Oranguntan/Polish/Sokolsky Opening, 1. b4) but he played 2. e4!? quickly, and he knows full well that I play it often as white. Still, with native ability and a poker face on his side, he was able to escape with a draw despite finding his theory expiring rather too quickly. Whilst being totally freaked out by the white attack by the end is nothing to be ashamed of in my view, overlooking 10... f6 is another matter - how could I simply forget about this move? The only explanation is the often tricky transition from bashing out theory to thinking for oneself; 9... Qe7 was the last move I could just recall from memory.

 The end position defies objective analysis. Let us be clear: white, one of the country's strongest student players, a professional chess coach with a 2131 FIDE rating, has been simply outplayed by me. Yet still, he has huge pressure despite being a Rook down, and black must defend with more accuracy than I would expect to be capable of to survive. Even Houdini needs time to figure out what to do with black, and even when it 'clarifies' matters to Q+R+B+3P vs. Q+R+N+4P, it's not at all clear how things stand. But that seems somehow fitting for such a surreal game.