With friends like these...

 Round 3 was the last to be played on Saturday before we retired to the hotel restaurant (their £10 chess buffet offer wasn't cheap by my rather ascetic standards, but was good enough to be recommended anyway... however I'm digressing) and beyond. To the delight of moreorless no-one, Bristol managed to get our first two teams paired with one another. The rules for squad composition meant this should be easy on paper, as I would be board 1 in their team - it was 187-162, 180-156, 168-110, 162-110 - but there are a lot of hackers in our teams, the time control is fast, and not everyone was on form.

 My own pairing was another example of my ability to get nervous for little apparent reason - I was playing our league B-team captain, Richard Porter (110), and have seen his play often enough to have some grasp of how to win, but I've lost a lot of friendly games to him. I conveniently overlooked the fact that I can and do lose to anyone in friendly games, and that many of them have been blunders in won positions, and so wasn't really looking forward to the prospect.

 In fact, the game did threaten to go that way - as usual in our games, I had much the better of the opening, but then made a misjudgement and was soon worse. This time, however, it was my opponent who lost concentration and let me back into it, and from then on normal service was resumed.

 Things elsewhere did not go so well - LLWW would be a loss on board count in a knockout event! On board 1 our player played his habitual Exchange French and was crushed (!), board 2 was a very sharp accelerated Dragon where black was winning but played too slowly at the critical moment and suddenly found himself mated, and board 3 saw us get no advantage from the opening, gross tactical oversights and a lot of luck that black lost his way - when one considers that I was much worse at one stage, a 0-4 loss was by no means inconceivable.

 I found it interesting that when I mentioned casually that I was much worse when the Bristol squad was eating together in the evening, my opponent seemed very much surprised by this assessment. I concede that I was slow to appreciate myself that it was so during the game, but it is obvious when you open your mind to the possibility - I think we were both blinded by grade consciousness, at least for a time. There is a very tenacious fighter in me somewhere (he would return for the final round) and this helped me extricate myself, with some help, and then carry on slowly outplaying white as though nothing had happened. Even in strategically-orientated games like this one, games between opponents of widely differing strength such as here almost always seem to be decided by tactical oversights - on this occasion, 24. Bb5?? was the culprit.

 Luckily, we now had the night to scamper away into with tails between our legs, before resurfacing on Sunday morning for the penultimate round, once again an 'easy' pairing, this time against UCL.