"Mistakes are inevitable"

 Perhaps I was tempting fate in my last post by saying that I hoped to miss the next match - a last-minute withdrawal forced me to play after all. Since I had four whole hours of work for a group project, I couldn't spend all day preparing this time - a horrifying thought to face the same constraints as almost every other player in the league...

 We were playing Bath, fighting hard to avoid a shock relegation. On the strength of their squad they should be nowhere near the bottom, but all the 3.5-2.5 scores have been going against them*. Even the University team pulled it off at the start of the season. Not before time, they have pulled themselves together and started picking up points recently - so I wasn't surprised to see that they brought a strong team, notwithstanding the loss of one of their players for the rest of the season. With our initial team it would still have been tight, but our top board had to miss it and board 3 dropped out so late that I didn't find out until I got home - thankfully, one of our players lives within walking distance of the venue. So Bath had to start as favourites: 194-212, 197-198, 160-184, 164-169, 156-174, 160-164.

 I was on board 5, with black against Barry Morris (174). The captaincy has meant that I've had very few blacks recently - the downside is that when you have an incomplete team, focussing on your own game is impossible! I wanted to avoid skewing the colour balance too far, and no-one seemed to have a particularly threatening line. So it proved here, though I was out of my threadbare preparation early on - a real chess game this time. After an up and down fight, we split the point - a result that was almost never feasible based on the position, but a fair reflection of how much we both missed:

 It's certainly not intentional, but I'm pulling off the old Soviet 'win with white, draw with black' strategy rather well in the league this season: I'm +5 =2 -1 with white and +1 =6 -0 with black! The final result (1.5-4.5; LLLWDL) was of course disappointing, but at least we aren't in danger of relegation. That said, we have to work to get third place now.

 A rather error-strewn game, it must be said - but I try to remember Korchnoi's words, that in a sharp struggle, "mistakes are inevitable." I think one has to be open-minded about it - like it or not, OTB chess is no place for a perfectionist. (Would I have been a correspondence player in a bygone age? Quite possibly.) I'm not a gambler - speculative sacrifices in my games just don't happen - but I am happy to create mutually difficult positions. This has gotten me out of more holes than I care to think about - I didn't like my position after 16... Rd8, but 17. Qf3? let me in - we're only human. A side-benefit is that time trouble is more likely, so you have additional chances of getting away with moves like my 30th and 35th! Of course it works both ways - I had two opportunities to win a clear pawn and got carried away, and with more time I would have hoped to convert the endgame - but would you rather have that or the games I was playing before Christmas?

 Given all that talk about objectivity being unimportant in chess, it's probably good that I'm not playing the 4NCL this weekend. Our next match is on Thursday, as advertised in the previous post.



* Still, could be worse. In the Surrey League, Guildford have been facing the exact same problem for most of the year - and are defending champions!