Emanuel Lasker, Lasker's Manual of Chess
With this post, I leave myself with only one more to go until I'm back up to date with all of my games. (That said, I do have a few other posts lined up, and whilst I have nothing scheduled as yet I daresay I'll find myself playing sooner or later.) However, for reasons that will become clear, this was a difficult game to return to.
After pick-pocketing Paul Jackson for the full point a week prior, I came into the penultimate, sixth, round feeling pretty good. My score of 3/5 was nothing special but no-one was above 3.5 (the strongest player in the section having taken a 0.5/2 bye to play in the European Schools Championship) and this seemed like an excellent chance to come up the inside and challenge for a rare tournament victory. If I could win here then it would be winner-takes-all in the final round - true, the last game would be very difficult, but with white and a week to prepare, who could say what would happen...? Of course, first I would have to win this game. But I was quietly confident, even playing black - I didn't think my opponent Anantha Anilkumar Jnr. (158/1746) was weak, but the opening would be a Be3 Najdorf. Though my results with it have been mixed, I still think it's a great line for black and one that I know relatively well.
The course of the game did nothing to change my opinion - white didn't seem to know it especially well and I soon had an overwhelming position. But all the positional understanding in the world is useless if you can't play chess!
Given the competitive significance, I think the above has to take over from this game as the lowest moment in my chess life up to this point. The manner of this defeat was absolutely devastating, the sort that makes you wonder why you bother playing chess at all (though fear not; I'm going nowhere even if I am doing an ECF Arbiter course next month!) To compound my misery, I missed the bus on the way out. Perhaps overtaken by the red mist, I started to walk and just kept on going: all the way from Coulsdon to my home in Carshalton, four-and-a-half miles away. Such a distance isn't to be recommended, but it at least gave me a while to mull over what had just happened.
Frankly, the game perfectly encapsulates what frustrates me about my chess. I've had a lot of good positions this year - a surprising number of people obligingly walked into opening preparation, but I also feel that my positional understanding is better than that of many of the people graded around me.* Sadly, my tactical ability is miles away from where it should be, likewise my technique. Thus I feel that I've lost a lot of points that I deserved, or rather (to put it in a way that is more twisted, bitter and accurate), that I've gifted my opponents a lot of points that they didn't deserve. Consider this game, where I played all-but perfectly for 27 moves, and then made a one-move oversight leading to instant resignation! The reader may not agree with my point of view, but when this sort of thing happens again and again, it's easy to understand that it becomes a real pain. How is it fair that opponents can get away with a whole game's worth of bad moves, whereas I make one mistake and lose immediately?
The answer of course is that it's not, but that's chess. We have to get up and get on with it, for there will always be another game. As I mentioned in the very previous post, Nunn is right that these things tend to balance out in time - after all, my win a week earlier was not a little fortunate. At the same time, we must learn: for me, the occasional hour on ChessTempo isn't enough to be tactically proficient, I have to stay alert, and I have to get out of the purely negative frame of mind where I am singularly obsessed with 'punishing' my opponents' 'weak' play. And I must stop ranting about my losses at quite such length!
Although this result destroyed any chance of tournament victory, I still had a small chance of sharing third if the other results were kind in the final week. Quite apart from that I was itching to expunge the memories of this disaster, and so looking forward to the next game.
* I hope not to sound arrogant by saying so - though I fear I won't succeed. Still, for some examples beyond the feature game see here, here and here. And yes, it was quite deliberate that I chose three more games I failed to win! Admittedly it could just be a function of preparation and a narrow repertoire - stronger opponents have made me look like I know nothing at all. At the same time, however, I don't feel that my Silman splurge last summer was entirely useless.
Edit, 29/07: Time heals all wounds eventually - it still hurts a lot, but at least I can think about chess again without this jumping to the forefront of my mind. And it has been a spur to start some proper work rather than just opening preparation. In a slightly less impassioned frame of mind, I've created an index on the subject of punishing opposition play - see the sidebar or here.
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