Over the line

 Relief at last - in 10 days I have blogged as many games and so reduced my queue to nothing. This is the last of them, but first some housekeeping - the July grading list came out earlier this week. (For now it can be found here, but the URL never seems to last more than a few months before it changes.) Moreorless as I predicted, my slowplay grade turned out to be 164, and my rapidplay is up one point to 149. So my highest slowplay grade, and a rapidplay grade that is disappointing but also, I now realise, a fairly truthful indication of my playing strength. Of course I hope to get higher, but I'm trying not to set a specific target this time - more in a future post. For now, onto the final round of the Summer Cup.

 I was playing white against Martin Faulkner, at the time of the game graded 150/1796. From his recent results I knew he was better than that, and indeed he is now 161 - but at the time, that was all I had to go on. He has been away from chess for a while (apparently he used to be a 180 in old grades before giving up in the early 1990s) so I didn't have any games to prepare with save those I'd seen him playing. I expected something solid, probably 1... e5, but beyond that it was anyone's guess. I was half-right: it was 1... e5 but once he opted for the Marshall Attack it certainly wasn't solid! Thanks to an exchange of blunders I defused his position completely, but a game relying on me to demonstrate good tactical vision and technique is unlikely to be one I play well. So it proved here.

 With regards to the opening, it turned out well for me but definitely shouldn't have done. I don't know the main lines of the Ruy Lopez as well as my Sicilian/French/Caro-Kann repertoire, so heading into the sharpest, longest line of them all without looking at it beforehand was certainly overconfidence in my opening play. 15. Re4!? is a valid idea (although having finally looked in some depth I don't think it is any better than the normal 15. Be3) but I didn't understand the implications for the Rook - 18... Nf4! would have destroyed my position very quickly.

 However (as if it needed to be brought up again) then my technique took over. The two key moments were on my 24th and 29th moves - the former saw me miss a very strong line (the very first move simply never occurred to me as a candidate) because I subconciously blocked it out as ugly, although the move I did play was OK. The second instant was a double tactical mistake, missing his ...Rxa2 resource and also the one instance (after 29. a4) when Re1 is a very good move by white. In some sense, tactics and technique are tied together: Karpov and Petrosian were, after all, extremely strong tactically! If you can't see tactics, you can't keep control of all the little details and rein in the opponent's possibilities. Weak tactical vision also precludes accurate calculation, as the variations on my 28th move show - thankfully in that instance my intuition could decide clearly what my concrete thinking could not.

 With that, the tournament was over. If I'd won this game I would have walked away with £30 thanks to the other results all going in my favour, but I honestly wasn't really thinking about it: for me this game was played in the shadow of the previous one, and the main reason I was there is that I like playing chess! Usually this has been a recipe for good results in the final rounds of tournaments, but not even that was enough here. Perhaps because I was in some sense relieved that it was all over. Again, I have some material for another post on my congress dilemma: where there is spare time, there will be spreadsheets. I have no chess lined up yet until the league season restarts in September, but plenty of posts I would like to make on other things: hopefully the tone will be a lot less introspective for a while.