This year the event split into two sections to cater to popular demand - a Championship for 1st-teams only, and a Plate for everyone else plus 1st-teams averaging under 140. It seemed to work since there was a record entry, and the AGM considered introducing an U-110 section too for next year. Bristol's patchy availability meant I would either be on board 4 for the A-team, or board 1 for the B-team - I was glad to be assigned the former against grading order, since even on the top board, the lower section was significantly weaker.
But of course, every silver lining has a cloud - our A-team got thrown in at the deep end of the Championship, paired with Imperial College London in the first round. That was our final-round encounter, in which I scored our only point, again on board 4, but we had chances all the way. Imperial won last year, but this time they were out to do it at a canter, and brought a frightfully strong team - my opponent from last year was now on board 4 for their B-team! Even more shocking, it was reported on the night before the event started that their board 1 (an FM) had dropped out - but they'd found a 196-graded substitute. I wish I could conjure players out of the air like that for my teams...
So the grades were decidedly against us: 197-216, 176-210, 177-210, 156-196. I was playing that 196-graded substitute, Arijit Gupta, on the bottom board. Surprisingly, the match turned out to be very close, a consequence no doubt of the section split - 160s/170s can at least put up credible resistance and sometimes more, whereas in the past the first round was very much a slaughter of the innocents. In fact at one stage it looked like we were on for a win, but it was not to be - and my game showed it more dramatically than any other:
Surprisingly then, it can be truthfully said that going down 1-3 (LLWL) was very harsh on us. Three of our players definitely register somewhere on the hacker scale, and that has to be the best way to play if one is to disrupt the natural order of things. As this game shows, even very strong players can completely lose the thread sometimes.
Out of the opening it was a quite unremarkable game for a grading difference of 40 - I just missed a couple of moves and lost a pawn, didn't know all the theory, and found myself in a lost position. I don't think I fully understand the move-order subtleties yet, but 12. h4 seems OK - 15. hxg6?! is the surprising culprit, and 16. Nd5? is definitely not to be repeated. Yet with 26... d5?? black managed to find seemingly the only way to go wrong! He said afterwards that he is often prone to missing Knight forks (having a sharp memory helps, but I feel it's always worth trying to find out everyone's little idiosyncracies like this - knowledge is power!) and soon I was actually winning. However he found the trickiest attempt on move 29, and I couldn't find the even tricker refutation. One can be forgiven for missing 31. Qh2!, but my actual choice is harder to explain - clearly I was not wrong when I identified calculation as one of the two big things I need to work on right now.
In the end, Imperial walked the event and won with a clean score - in fact this was probably the most danger they were ever in! As for us, a terrible disappointment, but our second-round pairing offered a good chance to bounce back.
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