Though a difficult job, I was glad to have it - otherwise I would almost certainly not have made the team! Rather to our surprise we gained a few players to compensate for those we'd lost - so now I am the 9th-highest graded player in the team. But this was a season-opener, and away, so I decided to pick myself anyway; beyond that I was happy to have our 5 strongest players available. The opposition, newly-promoted South Bristol B, are far from the toughest opposition we will face this year, but I was keen to make a statement. As it happened they got a strong team out by their standards, so it wasn't as one-sided as expected: 209-186, 196-197, e180-168, 186-161, 180-156, 159-153. That meant I had black against Robert Radford (153), who I beat on bottom board last season when we played South Bristol A. On the basis of their previous showings this season, that could hardly have been expected, but somehow I just knew...
On one level, this is quite similar to our previous encounter: I get an advantage, but make a meal of the conversion phase and only break through after a long fight. But the middlegame is very different: this time I didn't come out of the opening with a winning position, merely dynamic equality. Both sides lost their way after that, with Radford in particular missing some good chances. Then I missed an outright win and had to be content with a long victory in the endgame. After some false starts, it eventually came good:
A bare reading of the match result (4.5-1.5; WDWLWW) gives the impression that this was a fairly simple start to the season - but far from it! Only our first win, on top board, had us in control all the way; we had to work surprisingly hard for a draw on board 2, and our debutants on boards 3 and 5 had to resort to swindling to get the job done - it seems to be a rite of passage! For a while I was sure we were going to lose, and we'd never have heard the end of that. The most important thing was to get home with 2 match points, and we managed it.
I was happy with the way in which I played - energetically, but with some positional motivation. At the very least I played in accordance with the position, for white cannot be allowed to consolidate his space advantage in this sort of structure. But I had the niggling suspicion that it was just too messy to have been played correctly, and indeed Fritz is horrified by what it sees. The passage of play from moves 16 to 28 is just one mistake after another, with both sides missing clear wins and several tries for advantage. But yet again, by luck or judgement, I got through it better than my opponent. This only happens with any regularity when I am on form (from Easter until very recently, every such scrap went against me) so the signs are promising.
My next game was also very strange, but for entirely different reasons.
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