Omens

 To be honest, congresses have lost their sparkle for me somewhat - it is good to see so many people that I know, but I just don't play as well as I should. CCF congresses aren't the most appealing either - don't get me wrong, they are very friendly people, it's local and the entry fees are very good, but the entry is usually quite small and that has a corresponding impact on the prize fund. But as I explained in the previous post, I felt it necessary to get to 30 games, and that meant I needed to play a tournament; I couldn't get to the enticing e2e4 tournament at Sunningdale, so CCF it was. But with the knowledge that I 'always' do badly in tournaments, and the eternal pressure of grade-hunting, I had put a lot of pressure on myself; a poor congress performance might well become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 I did contemplate entering the Open here - perhaps I just did badly before because I have usually been a high seed recently?* But when I saw the Open had 7 entrants, only one of whom was graded below 185, I decided to go with the U-2000 section; I could win some games, I assumed, and I only had to beat a 143 performance to make a net gain on the 5 games I would be overwriting (none of which, funnily enough, were from congresses; a brief dip in league form and the first 4NCL weekend where I scored 0/2.) But at the back of my mind was the memory that I had thought exactly the same thing before the London Christmas U-165...

 As it happened, I was unpaired for the first round as the middle seed in an odd-numbered field. But I had a filler to play, and it wasn't an automatic full-point bye. Said filler was Harry Gold (108/1491), a regular at the CCF evening club but not someone I've played before. In its way, this is an interesting game, for white's opening was less than inspired but I couldn't get anything concrete. Eventually, not without some adventures, I steered into a better endgame, and played it well enough to have a winning position for one fleeting moment. But the chance slipped away, and indeed even the draw almost followed it...

 Before analysing I wasn't entirely sure if I played like a lemon, or just was unfortunate that my opponent played out of his skin. A look with Fritz confirmed my suspicion that it was the former, however. First there is the rather disrespectful move 9... Rb8, played solely to give white the opportunity to blunder by developing his Bishop to e3. Then I overlooked that 25. Ne4 would have overloaded my Queen. And then we get to the endgame, where if you can't see concrete lines you're always going to be in trouble. The Nxc5/b4 tactic passed me by (luckily I didn't allow it because I thought a blunder was an ingenious defence by white), I had a blindspot for breaking up my pawns with 43... e3 (the last chance to win) and was lucky that white had no serious winning chances even after I blundered away both of my central pawns. Above all, I had the old problem of being caught calculating the same 2-3 move sequence repeatedly; no wonder I was in time trouble! That is perhaps my own fault for making the position unnecessarily sharp.

 So an unnecessary reminder that I still need to find time to work on calculation (luckily, with my project in I am all-but done with university for the academic year, so the Aagaard book can come out soon.) Also it suggests that underperformance in congresses is down to me playing worse, not opponents playing better, than in evening games; I will return to this point in due course. But there was little time to ponder that, for with such a long game I didn't have much of a break before the second round began.


 * I plan to write a seperate post on the Congress Question after I have published all of the rounds from this tournament.