Larceny!

 For the penultimate round, I played another junior. That might seem obvious given that this is the stongest section of the London Junior Championships, but I've neglected to mention that it is combined with the Open section of the London Christmas Congress, so there were some adult players too (although a higher proportion of juniors than previous years, I think, and including U-21s we dominated the crosstable.) That junior was Gorak Rajesh (150/1458) who's just reached secondary school age. And of course, young juniors are especially prone in England, with its paucity of internationally-rated events, to massively low FIDE ratings. Even I am a case in point; when I first came on the list at 1781 in Autumn 2011 with an ECF grading of 129, the rating was even a little high, and produced by what were then my best-ever tournament results (here and Section A here.) But now, for someone who's playing to mid-160 strength, 1782 is too low (the ECF conversion of FIDE = ECF*8 + 650 says it should be about 1950.)

 That made this defeat traumatic, but the Elo points lost were really just a case of kicking a man whilst he's down. I arrived a few minutes late after oversleeping, but quickly established a dominant positional advantage. It slipped, I recovered it, it slipped again, things clarified to a draw, and then I was robbed in disgusting circumstances:

 Hmmph! This one will rankle for a while. But for the avoidance of doubt, I have no bones with the arbiter's two-minute ruling - I blundered a pawn; he was making progress. I gather the next edition of the FIDE Laws of Chess make provisions for the arbiter to introduce a Fischer increment instead of making recourse to the current mechanism, which puts a lot of pressure on the claimant - if you have only one or two seconds a move, blunders can happen even in easily drawn positions like this one.

 Really, I just don't think my opponent had any right to win. Indeed, he was lucky even to be drawing, as he mishandled the opening terribly and could have resigned after 20 moves. Even when things ebbed away, I established a winning position again, but just didn't ice him when I had the chance. A shame, as I played patches of a nice game. Perhaps the fatigue that caused me to oversleep had an effect, and of course being the last game in the room to finish hardly helped matters. It just seems a case of daylight robbery to play to win only because I have little time, but as I've said before chess isn't usually fair.

 I felt very angry after this (which is rare; I can be irritated so easily that some see it as a recreational pastime, but outright angering me is much harder) and could sense that in the final round, I would either blast my opponent off the board or watch myself crash and burn horribly. That meant an unfortunate state of affairs for my final opponent of 2012.