This post is about a league game last week, which took us back to our erstwhile 'home' venue, the local Holiday Inn, to take on Clifton B, who really do play there. They seem to be our bogey team; on paper they're nothing remarkable (despite having an IM on board one!) but we've never beaten them in my time in Bristol and they ended our long unbeaten run last season. This time we were hit by a lot of absences, such that for the first time all season I had to call up a B-team player. Nevertheless, the grades suggested a tight battle: 194-209, 197-186, 176-169, 156-161, 160-158, 132-160.
I was on board 4, and so had black against a 161, Jody Johnson. For any number of reasons (desire to capitalise on my excellent form, his irritating speed of play, the constant waft of alcohol across my face, meeting yet another person who deviated from my prep on move 1...) I was very much up for a fight on this occasion. I got a very good position very early on, and came up with an interesting way to prosecute it - I sacrificed something! OK, only a pawn, but it worked very well - until time trouble made one of its unexpected appearances:
Even near the end I thought we might pull something off, but it emphatically wasn't to be, eventually we lost 1-5 (LLLDDL) which probably puts paid to our title ambitions for this year. After every loss, the relegation zone starts to look close again, though we should be fine really.
Since going back to 1. e4, I've also gotten back into the belief that activity is the most important thing in chess - not least for me personally, since I struggle when there's nothing to do. Here we see another game that proves it. Quieter positional plans were quite strong, but somehow I just haven't made the link between the Sicilian and the minority attack. So 15... b4!? happened. One of my team-mates pithily commented that it meant my position before was so good that I could blunder a pawn and still be better, but Fritz is actually quite keen! I have strange ideas sometimes, but they're not all bad. For an evening-league game in particular it seems a good move - black's position suddenly starts to play itself, for he suddenly has a clear plan of pressuring the Queenside, as well as open lines for the Rooks and the Bishop Pair.
Annoyingly though, I stumbled once more at the winning post after doing all the hard work (although it must be said that white's desire to maintain the rapid tempo of his moves helped a lot.) I missed easy wins on move 29 and 31, missed a cleaner way on move 33, and allowed him to survive on move 35. Literally, I couldn't string two accurate moves together! Even my draw offer is not so easy to justify once the emotion of the moment is removed: I should have appreciated my chances in the resulting endgame, and 9 minutes is still a lot of time. The clock definitely presented a problem though. Yes, I was playing a fast player, but in the early phase I just couldn't focus. Time management per se is not a problem (at least not yet - but I do seem to get into time pressure a little more often than I used to) - the issue is that I seem to get more flustered when I do get down to the last few minutes, and this has cost me more than a few half-points this season through unnecessarily rushing. The game with Gower is another recent example, and there would be more in the next event.
The event in question was the 2014 British Universities Championship - 5 rounds over two days at a very fast control. It was much stronger this year than last, so what could I expect?
No comments:
Post a Comment