Happy days are here again

 The third round of the Steve Boniface Memorial Open was on Saturday afternoon, and I had sunk to the depressingly familiar depths of the bottom board, where I had black for the second game in a row against Joseph Turner (172). Given how I had lost my way in the mess of the second round, I wanted a slow, positional game, and given that my opponent's play seemed to revel in the opposite, my opening choice was not hard.

 Nonetheless, I have the curious 'gift' of being able to magically conjure a sharp game from any position, and this one soon exploded as well, rather against my will. However, thanks to a couple of oversights, white paid too high a price for the complications - on the board and the clock - finally allowing me a long overdue victory:

 A diligent reader can hardly have failed to notice that I am laughably erratic, so hopefully this will kick off a run of form to cancel out the previous 9 games. This was a gritty performance, but overall I thought I played rather consistently. The Caro-Kann has been a dependable weapon and this season I've scored a remarkable 5/5 and 196 performance with it - the Sicilian is a powerful but risky alternative, and lately it hasn't been working very well; evidently the decision to use my reserve opening was a good one!

 As I said repeatedly in my annotations, this game had more in common with a French Defence, however. I surrendered my light-squared Bishop's mobility for a solid position; black will claim it's compact, white that it's cramped. Some unusual manouevres (...Kf8, ...Nh6 and ...Nc6-e7) highlight black's confidence in the security of his King, and this time it seems to have been justified - more importantly black's Queenside pressure has some teeth, unlike in the previous round. White single-mindedly ploughed ahead on the Kingside, trusting in the space-gaining e5 pawn as a strength, not a target. But not for nothing did Botvinnik term the French Defence "a difficult and dangerous opening" - both sides made some poor decisions. My Knight on h6 performed a useful function but really had no future there once the Queen it attacked moved to safety, white's 13th and 14th moves were very weakening, and my eccentric 16... d4? could have punished far more effectively than by grabbing a pawn on h7 that was irrelevant and poisoned. After that, black's pressure on the Queenside developed with amazing speed, but I lacked the guts to finish it off properly and had to be content with him blundering an exchange along with all of his counterplay in time trouble.

 Still, a win is a win! On the whole I still think it was one of my quieter games in the tournament, and by keeping the confusion to minimal proportions I managed to see my way through. My defence was rather too cautious, but after the humbling in round 2, this time I saw everything that needed to be seen. Black's position remained solid throughout, and such positions have a surprising number of resources.

 Round 4 on Sunday morning marked a regression to the bad old days, even if I did get away with it. But in some ways it marked the end of an era.