Taking liberties

 The next game (played almost three weeks ago now - so much for getting them out faster) was the fourth round of seven at the CCF Summer Cup. I had the black pieces against Michael Williams (152/1690), a player who plays this event every year but mainly evening-league games for Wimbledon. That meant no games in the database and no home-cooked win this time! Still, I was not completely unarmed. Given the openings I play, it is quite useful that I have been blessed with a pretty good memory - particularly for inane trivia. If there were no such thing as ChessBase then I could surely make a killing, for my true calling seems to be remembering the openings of other peoples' chess games.

 In this case, I remembered that Williams had twice had white in games against Castles (here and here) and that he had lost both by unjustifiably lashing out. Both started 1. d4/2. c4, so I was confident it would be a King's Indian. As to which line, I had no idea - and it was good that I didn't focus on anything in particular, since he chose something I've never seen before. To be blunt, it was just bad, and black soon had a commanding advantage simply by playing natural moves. Yet I once again failed to take my chances, and white was allowed to escape:

 My inability to punish the transgressions of my opponents is something that really annoys me about my chess, and it kept coming through in this tournament. But more about that in another post. For now, it's enough to say that white's opening play was less than impressive. I've always thought the Four Pawns Attack is riskier for white than for black; no doubt it's playable if treated correctly, but the first player must know his stuff too. 7. Be3?! might get me out of book, but playing such an obviously bad move is too high a price to pay: after this black is already better. But surely the move which demands the most ire is 11. h3?. In a position where white has grabbed the centre and provoked black into sink-or-swim active play, and has already made multiple positional concessions, does he really think he should be able to get away with wasting a whole tempo like this? Even after my inaccurate move order (incidentally, I have no idea why I thought it was important to play ...Re8 ahead of time - my dislike of Bxd6 apparently tricked me into forgetting I have a move after Bxf4) black has a massive position.

 The key moment when things got away from me though was after 13. Nd5??. In the end, white's attempt to solve his problems by force worked, but it didn't deserve to. It might seem counter-intuitive to swap Queens, but at the same time it is the logical follow-up since black's initiative is his most valuable asset. It is the same reasoning that justifies 14... Nxe4!, but I just couldn't make it check out tactically. Black has two captures on move 16 and I didn't calculate either correctly. (It's funny how I now see calculation errors in all of my games having never really mentioned this facet of the game until recently. It makes you wonder how many other glaring problems there are which remain completely invisible to me...) After bailing out with 15... Nxd5 black no longer has very much, and small advantages like that will always be wiped out by my lack of technique (cf. 18... Nxe2?!) anyway.

 Those readers who are becoming exasperated by my slow publishing schedule will no doubt be overjoyed to hear that my next outing was a 7-round rapidplay tournament. The notes will probably be close to Informator style, but that's no promise they will appear right away!