It's been a long time since I played for the Surrey county teams - last year I came home for a couple, but this year I have been doing 4NCL instead. But with term over before the semi-finals of the national stage, I was happy to make myself available for the U-180 team - my first ever game for the county second-team. We were playing Essex, who finished second in the regional stage. Given that we finished first we might have been considered slight favourites, but they did have home advantage. As it happened, average grades were very close, and indeed it was a tight match.
I was on board 13, with white against Christopher Hampton (163). This was a tough struggle, but in the end black was carried through by his sheer will to win. You might say that I got a taste of my own medicine, but actually black's play was not especially impressive and I had ample opportunity to survive. That I did not is down to a mixture of similarly weak play and psychology:
This was my first loss in a county game for almost four years. To be honest, it is good to get the monkey off my back, for I was increasingly nervous just at the thought of playing for Surrey - but certainly not at this moment! Having been a very useful player hitherto (in the three previous seasons I scored 7/9, 7.5/9 and 1.5/2) losing what was effectively the decisive game of the national semi-final was not the best first impression for the U-180s! Analysing the ending in depth only reinforces my gut impression at the time that I ought to have held it.
Currently I am daring to dream that my calculation is slowly improving - as I will hopefully show with the two games to follow, I am at least looking at the right moves, rather than making silly oversights left, right and centre. Looking at them doesn't always result in playing them though. It was a psychological failing here; I've noticed in the past that when I'm surprised in the opening, I tend to automatically assume I am worse, even with white - an unfortunate habit, for it makes me play far too defensively. Even my first independent move, the pseudo-aggressive 13. g4?!, is really a defensive measure - to kick the black Knight from f6 so that I gain d5 as a retreat square (!) from the advance of his b-pawn. My only serious calculation error was in the 21. Qxc5! variation, where I missed the idea of f4 trapping the Knight if it takes on h5. This was 15 ply away, and after a long thought - to be improved, certainly, but in the past I wouldn't have bothered to even look that far.
Still, for once it was an opponent who played too directly (17... b4?!, 20... Rc5?!, 37... Ke6?, 40... Ke5?!, 44... Rg3?) and so I got into an ending which should have been held without any great difficulty. But once again I was betrayed by my poor technique - something I decided not to work on so much this year, for having tried to improve my handling of positions I dislike last year, this summer it is the turn of those I do like! 27. Rc4 is not a bad move per se, but the start of a slippery slope since it allows black to get active for no good reason. It's here that the little missed details start to add up - allowing his Rook to the a-file and then the back rank, not getting in f4 for free whilst I had the chance, not considering the idea of 34... Rb7 (when I thought it was a dead draw - it is easy to be demoralised when you realise you still have to prove it), the 'monkey sees a check, gives a check' 48. Rh5+, and lastly going into a R-RP on the assumption that it should be drawn. True, I did not have much time in which to play the ending (a combination of nervousness and all that extra calculation) but this isn't really forgiveable at county speed. There's only one Surrey player who regularly battles the clock in these matches, and he's a correspondence GM!
So a very disappointing day for me and the team. But there were some flashes of competence, and my game in the Summer Cup at CCF the next day went some way towards improving my mood.
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