With a long-overdue win under my belt come Sunday morning, I had some reason to feel more upbeat: wins and losses alike tend to come in large clusters, and a late repairing dropped the grade of my opponent by 25. Hence, I had white against Dave Tipper (145), renowned as a walking ECO in Bristol, where he is also Results Secretary and Webmaster (the Bristol League website is a sprawling but very useful resource to be found here.)
To give a hint of what's to follow in the annotations, my practical handling of this situation was wrong in seemingly every possible way! The normal method for beating lower-graded players is well-known: play to your strengths, avoid the randomising factor of unnecessary complications, and wait for them to beat themselves. This season I've generally been very good at doing this on top board for the University B-team, but here this talent deserted me. Of course, the above advice is even more true if you know you don't handle strange positions very well, which I had been reminded of by round 2. So, knowing I should go for a comfortable, stable game, I played... wait for it... the King's Gambit. I very nearly got what I deserved:
Not the most accurate game I've ever been involved in, to put it mildly. After my old illness, excessive attachment to material, got me into hot water (something which I took far, far too long to realise - overconfidence, dare I say?) I calculated irrelevant lines slowly and wrongly, lucked into an endgame with a clear extra pawn and nothing to offset it, yet still managed to walk into a forced checkmate which might well have been found if not for my opponent's suicidal tendencies in his management of the clock. Even after escaping that fiasco, I still made a meal of things before finally establishing a winning position once and for all on move 38. So the expected result in the end, but it's hard to say how. I can only point to Spassky's words at the head of the post. Perhaps for no other reason than that I absolutely hate losing, I have long liked to see myself as a tenacious fighter in bad positions, and I've dug myself out of more than a few holes in the past.
But the fact that I managed to escape such a difficult situation is really nothing more than a happy post-script - more than anything I have to ask how I ever got into such a mess in the first place. The answer is really quite simple: I played a crazy opening line and then wondered why the position became so hard to navigate. For example: in a normal game, if a Knight on e5 gets prodded by ...f6, you move the Knight to safety; here you castle, ignore the attack and trust in a big pawn centre as compensation. I can hardly stop myself from playing sharply, but avoiding these irrational situations, where I lack the imagination and calculating ability to see my way through, is entirely possible.
And so, starting from the Sunday afternoon round, I finally made the difficult and overdue decision to break up with 1. e4. It's been a long and happy relationship, despite my occasional affairs with other moves, and we're still friends. Don't get me wrong, I still think it's the objectively best move on the board: the only one that opens up two useful lines for development, directly controls the centre, and facilitates rapid castling all at once. But I need to explore different pastures: my understanding of the move comes from a time when I wanted the game to go nuclear straight out of the opening, and so I find it hard to play differently now that I don't. The new ideal is a sharp but clear battle, and if that seems like a paradox then allow me to explain with reference to my final game.
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