Objectivity vs. Practicality

 CCF is pretty much the only tournament I can think of that dares to try and squeeze in 3 games at this time control into a single day. The final round started at 6pm, and many players unsurprisingly took a half-point bye, although the hardy souls in the Open almost all stayed. I was still around, and that meant that I now got to play black against Robin Haldane - two rounds late and the wrong colour, but the pairing I'd predicted for the start.

 Robin is one of the most well-known congress players in the South-East, currently graded 179/2115, and provides definite support for the theory that a chess-player's style is a mirror of their personality. He is one of the nicest, most gentle people you could hope to meet, but a route-one hacker at the board - an approach that has brought a number of scalps, especially at rapid time controls, where I count 9 defeated IMs on the grading database!

 That being the case, perhaps heading for the Sicilian Najdorf, surely the sharpest part of my opening repertoire, was not a good idea! My knowledge wasn't as extensive as it needed to be, and my position out of the opening was too bad to allow protracted resistance:

 Once again, we can see me paying the price for taking the most violent course in the opening, a very bad practical decision! That said, some investigation suggests that the whole 10. Bd3 line shouldn't be much to fear if black plays properly, and the 12. Nd5!? sacrifice cannot be correct - as Haldane knew at the board! Tal once said that "you must take your opponent into a deep dark forest where 2+2=5, and the path leading out is only wide enough for one" and it was a confusing enough position that almost any human player will struggle to arrive at the correct defence in a tournament game. It says a lot of these lines, I think, that the reflex move 14... Kxe7? is what got me into real trouble. Nonetheless, to repeat the old dictum, it's worse to know a little theory than none at all, and that was the cause of my downfall. I knew his 12th move isn't good, but never put much attention into why and just noted that white 'always' plays Qg3 instead.

 It's not really related to the game at all, but one comment he made in the postmortem struck me as interesting when I thought about it later, because I realised it is a problem I also have sometimes - he said that his issue is not so much that he only ever goes for the King, but that he can only ever play on a small section of the board. I have been known to play positional games, but they almost always confine themselves to the Queenside; the opposite for when I let myself go. I haven't really considered if it is a regular thing or just a few examples jumping into my head, but it does merit some attention. Also, he said that he is a pessimist, which strikes me as odd for a hacker - surely you need to have faith that your attack will succeed because it's an attack, irrespective of its positional merits?

 So far the tournament had gone moreorless as I would have expected if given advance notice of all the pairings. However, the round 4 game left me in a gloomy mood.