Critical Moments

 At the time of writing, the opening rounds of the 4NCL season still don't seem that long ago - of course that was truer still three-and-a-half weeks ago and yet already the penultimate round was upon us! We were playing the Fermented Sharks, who seem to be mostly comprised of players from Athenaeum, a club in the centre of London. By ECF grades we were giving away a lot: 185-220, 197-201, 176-200, 177-196, 177-197, 156-161. It would be a tough ask, but many of our players have sharp styles so we could hope.

 My posting on the bottom board not only meant two whites out of three, but it also meant I avoided the worst of the damage when we got a strong team. My opponent, Jonathan Kay (161/1945) has that rarest of things - a FIDE rating that almost exactly corresponds to his ECF grade. I just thought it was wildly inflated! Unfortunately when playing opponents with relatively high ratings I tend to throw away the opportunity, so I was hoping history wouldn't repeat itself. It didn't, but I could still have done rather better:

 It was a 2-4 loss for us (LDDDLD) but again we might have scored higher - besides the two flattering draw offers, the top board could have gone either way. But these things happen, and it only meant that we were yet again back to the 50% scoregroup.

 Anyway, onto my game. As the title implies, the game turned on the so-called critical moments. For this I will use Aagaard's definition in Excelling at Chess Calculation, where he writes "we can outplay our opponents positionally and then fail to win again and again, because we do not sense the critical moment, the moment when we have to change our frame of mind from logical and conceptual thinking to actual calculation." Yes, that word again! But is this game not a perfect example of what he means? I can justly be pleased with my play over the first 20 moves, when white's rather fanciful play gradually led him into an ever-worsening position. Yet when the opportunity to punish him arrived - 21... f3, triggering the collapse of white's Kingside - I failed the test. The lines and the ideas are straightforward but I wasn't willing to put in the effort to check them, and so unwilling to expose myself to the 'risk' of opening up the game: I refused to change tack from constraining him and eventually rounding up the h5 pawn. The very next move, I was guilty of that other cardinal sin, assumption - I 'had' to recapture the pawn, so I didn't give consideration to the very logical blocking move ...g4!. Finally I offered a draw in a position where only I could try to win, scared of an attack on my King that had already been neutralised and of time-trouble that was no such thing.

 When I played this game, I had not yet annotated the game with Benson that set off the current obsession with thinking processes. If I had, then who knows? My opponent is slightly higher graded, but I will be blunt enough to say I completely outplayed him for most of the game (and after stumbling into a relatively quiet line at that) and should have won. In between annotating these games I have been doing some exercises, so maybe I can whinge about something else once some more games come up. But first comes the Monday round at the 4NCL. I'll drop in a spoiler and say that it was a bit of a disaster. But never fear - I will grumble at my inability to follow a different set of ideas this time. Besides, I got given an excellent excuse.