Trying to prepare didn't help much either - he's played a lot in the 4NCL, but faced 1. e4 almost exclusively. I knew I would play the English, but couldn't say what would happen next - he plays the Grand Prix Attack as white, so if I'd had to guess in advance I would have gone for one of the similar colours-reversed systems at black's disposal. Very wrong! It was instead a Queen's Indian Defence, where I finally strung together a good game only to throw it away again in unpredictable circumstances. However there are some positives, not least that I was finally hit on the head with realisation of what's been going wrong lately:
Generally I don't buy into predestination and the like (don't understand theological concepts? History at Bristol is the course for you) but at times like this one does begin to wonder... and that's the best way to make it happen, so of course I failed to win in the final round as well. A player must be both objective and confident - yet at times these can be mutually exclusive!
Surprising though it may seem, on the whole I am actually quite pleased with this game. In recent months I've been going on and on about the need to rein back my attacking tendencies, which kept landing me in hot water when I approached positions too crudely. Having resorted to the shock treatment of putting 1. e4 on a shelf for a while, I then realised after Golders Green that I had completely overdone it and basically stopped playing chess entirely until an equal endgame arose - suspiciously like the 'old man' caricature I mentioned two posts ago! The problem continued into the start of this event, but here we finally saw me realigning properly, and conducting a slow-burn positional attack.** If I could play in this manner all the time I would be happy - I wanted to go for the King and was sure that it was positionally correct, but didn't rush in all-guns-blazing with f4 and Nd5 until my pieces were poised for it. This patience is the one thing my play has always lacked!
But - a draw is a draw. Even when the win was offered right at the end, by the suicidal-looking 28... Ke8??, I didn't see it, although maybe this is understandable given the circumstances. My employment of reflex moves (14. b3?!, 22. exd5?? and 29. Qh8+?? being the main culprits) highlights a problem that I had previously misidentified, however. For many months now, I have been missing even the basic details in game after game. I assumed that poor tactical ability was at fault - after all, once I was satisfied that it was at the 'survival threshold', I stopped working on it. But actually, I was tactically alert here - I had to see a lot of things to only fall into one of Porter's many traps in the first round, and when I went to the trouble of investigating the ...Nxe4 complications in this game, I saw everything that needed to be seen.
But before you can see, you have to look - the real issue is that I keep losing concentration at vital moments! Since tactics are latent in almost any position, it doesn't take much to trigger a landmine, and so this is the most common manifestation. But it also explains, to use some recent examples, the breaking of my own blockade with 67. Bxf5?? against Porter, or trapping two of my pieces in one move against Abboud at Golders Green, or letting Hardwick's pinned Knight escape. It is enough to point out that these all happened when I thought either that the position was drawn or that I was completely winning - at such moments, I let my guard down too often.
There have been many psychological points to draw from this tournament. The last round puts the spotlight on new topics - symmetrical openings, and catering to the opponent.
* Only second-bottom by FIDE ratings, but we all know they're of curiousity value only - or, as I gloomily joked in relation to the younger players who mostly populated this tournament, a reflection on how prematurely the rating was obtained. Most people's ratings were 100-150 points out; Castles' sporadic top board a huge 299! (177 / 1767, and the ECF grade was 195 18 months ago!)
** My model in this, you might or might not be surprised to know, is not one of the staple classical players (Fischer, Capablanca, Smyslov...) but Botvinnik. Quite how he has a reputation for being dull, I have no idea! Having looked at many of his games lately, I am convinced he was a very aggressive player. True, he wasn't always after the King, but he insists on activity, his pieces only ever go forwards, and he didn't fear even the sharpest positions. I could write a whole post about it, but since the credo of this blog is objectivity rather than fanboy-ism, it can wait for another time...
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