"Thank you and goodnight"

 Yesterday I concluded my games in the latest Castles internal rapidplay tournament, attending the club for the last time before Bristol beckons. Whilst I dramatically outgraded 2 of my 3 opponents in the games presented below (amazingly, the same people I had to play in the last such tournament!) the games were all interesting in their own way.

 After the long fight with Neill Cooper a few posts down ("Cooper Diem") dragged on over the allotted time for two rounds, I got a half-point bye for the second round. The next week, I managed to get both games played, though still much less punctually than the other games going on at the same time. First, I played Dylan Perera, who I really struggled against in our previous meeting. This time I quickly gained a winning advantage, and although I still allowed the smallest hint of unnecessary counterplay (a regular fault of mine in online blitz in particular) the result wasn't hard to predict:

 However, my run of 7 consecutive victories at rapidplay chess off the back of Richmond came to an end at the hands of Jon-Man Chung (116) in the next round. From our previous blitz games, I have noted that he seriously dislikes technical endings (when you lose two slightly better endgames against me of all people, you know something is wrong!) and plays them alarmingly slowly, and it looked for a while like this was going to be the same. Yet despite navigating my way through a sharp Fischer-Sozin Najdorf to a clearly better ending which I proceeded to grind away at, and running him down to the 10-second increment late on, I just couldn't quite finish him off...

 It would have been disappointing to end on a draw though, and I was back the next week; this time I played one game only because of a reduced session length rather than my own slowness. I played white (at last!) against Kiran Gopinathan (59) against whom I previously had black in an interesting Caro-Kann Exchange when I sacrificed a pawn for positional pressure to eventually win a Rook & Pawn endgame. The previous game of the current tournament, though interesting, was not really my kind of game - this one was:

 So 3/4 overall. It has not escaped my notice that I actually lose grading points for the two wins however! Since I'm not a junior, the boundary for 40-point rule calculations is fixed at 120; for the two wins I performed only at 130 but that's well below my playing strength to judge by recent results. Still, I just wanted to play! I am fortunate enough to get free membership as a university student, so ought to make use of it. There are some interesting things to be gleaned from these games however - it would be nice to say that my inability to calculate long variations was down to laziness in winning positions and the time control, but I doubt it is so simple. Something to think about if I have time at university, anyway...

 Now I depart Castles for a while at least, and thanks to a combination of factors (bad scheduling and a misguided rule change being the main culprits) I shall not be able to play for them either in the Surrey League or at CCF this season. The memories shall not be forgotten, however.

 Next, it was time to say goodbye to my other club for a while, which I did in the best possible way.