With a week completely free of exams or indeed anything else, my pre-tournament preparations really did amount to overkill. A welcome side-effect of long, intense days was the temporary disappearance of my insomnia, which helped a lot - for once I actually got stronger and stronger as the event progressed. Besides that, I tried to dabble in all of the weak areas in my game I could think of, and once I had adjusted later in the event, I believe it was very helpful indeed.
However, this event as all others began with the first round, and since I declined the popular Friday-night bye, that meant I started with an evening game, as white against 179-graded Adam Musson. I should actually have played him on my birthday, when the University played Bath, but he failed to show up and they defaulted a board. Anyway, he appeared this time and promptly threw my opening preparation out of the window by playing a Caro-Kann. If you've been following the blog you'll know of the myriad of difficulties it's presented me lately, and so I returned to an old favourite, the Panov-Botvinnik Attack. It worked wonders, but several early wins went begging and I landed in an inferior middlegame. Playing perhaps the one person around with technique worse even than mine, things were unclear until the very end, but eventually the game followed the scripted ending:
Curiously, I remember that when just over two years ago, as a 121, I suicidally entered the Open section at a Richmond Rapidplay, I played the Panov-Botvinnik against a 166 and again was dominating the opening skirmish only to throw the full point away. Quite what this says, I am not sure! Of course, I am much stronger now and really ought to have iced him whilst I had the chance - I knew what I should be doing (9. d5!) but 12/14. O-O, 14. Qe3+ or 15. Qc4 would in all likelihood have resulted in a miniature. Yet in the postmortem, Musson didn't seem very concerned at all - perhaps this was plain overconfidence, and if so I was on the other side of the coin later in the event.
After that it didn't take me long to give away a pawn and drift into a passive position. The chance to confuse matters with 27. Rxb2!? was welcome, but I recognised that it meant my King would get some exercise and so it needed nerves to play. Musson seemed really put out by the unexpected resistance and my suddenly quick play - the exchange of blunders on move 34 left me suddenly close to winning! But it was not to be - missing 39. f3 cost me the full point once again. It was time that did for me in this game - a defining feature of almost all of my games in the event, but only here was I the one suffering, so I think it was just down to rustiness and a bad position rather than a newly-developed illness.
The second round, on Saturday morning, continued the theme of missed opportunities.
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