Patience is a virtue

 The penultimate round of the CCF Easter Open gave me my second game of the season against the junior player Koby Kalavannan (156/1659), again with white. Although I did not play especially well in our previous encounter, an evening league game, I out-blitzed him in the run-up to the time control from an equal position and was able to conclude with a nice Queen sacrifice. Also in our game last season (link in the earlier post) I outplayed him, and took a draw for team reasons. As such, whilst I worry to some degree before every game, I was not unusually jittery about this pairing.

 That said, seeing him look at the pairing and then disappear for the half-hour until the round started convinced me I was being prepared for, and I didn't fancy a battle in a Sicilian where the other side is prepared and I'm not! As such, I took the opportunity to try an opening I've often been tempted to play. This worked delightfully and I got a great position, but with only a couple of weak moves was able to completely ruin it, and in the end I was crushed:

 Hard though it is to believe, there are some players with even less accurate FIDE ratings than mine, and Kalavannan is one of them. My final opponent was unrated and so the tournament will cause me to lose 11.25 Elo - it's 200 points out and yet this is the third event in a row to send it down! But, to put it bluntly, I have stopped caring - lifting it up is a thankless task because rated opponents are mostly either Open-strength, or young and undergraded. In any case, most people understand ECF grades better, and they are much more accurate simply because they are based on more games.

 Onto this particular game. It started life as a Trompowsky, but it soon drifted back into the realm of 1. e4, turning into a slightly offbeat Pirc. It's a sharp game of course; white must land the killer punch on the Kingside before black does likewise on the other side of the board. But I was too keen, and unwilling to countenance more retreat than I needed to - 20. d5? was not needed, and although I could have got a decent game with the right follow-up, after 21. Qe5+?? I was in real trouble. I can't recall ever being quite so fixated on a lack of development - in blitz hack attacks like this it is often something I blindly ignore, and lose for it, but perhaps that is precisely why it was on my mind here. Yet again, seeking and getting such a position was not for the best, despite the fact that it was objectively in my favour most of the time.

 My final game, as I have said, was unrated, and although it didn't mean much I was determined to reach an almost-respectable 2/5.