I had a lot of chess over the last weekend of June, even though I was only playing on the Saturday. The next day, I was to be one of the managers of the Surrey teams at the U-18 County Championships, and since we were also hosting the event it was a long and busy day!* First I wanted to get some games in myself though, and so I went to CCF for a 7-round rapidplay. I played the same event last year (the start of my ill-fated dalliance with Queenside openings) and though I was as erratic as usual, it went well on the whole - not least because I won a grading prize. Since I felt that I was playing better now than a year ago, and had my opening repertoire nailed down, I hoped to be near the top of the table again.
Things started smoothly enough with a win against a junior (one of many to come in a contingent from Sussex), Hugo Westwood-Dunkley (103.) It's been ages since I played a Sicilian (my rare games with black are all King's Indians at the moment) but it was to prove pretty much the only reliable weapon on this day:
More than once I've been condemned to yo-yoing in CCF's single-section events, and for the second round I was up to board two (and that only because I was moved down a board to stop a family pairing!). I had white against David Graham (200/2146) and betrayed my lack of understanding of the position; it didn't take long for me to be positionally lost. I managed to fight back into an opposite-Bishop endgame a pawn down, but that wasn't enough:
The third round was the low point of the event, as I crashed to a loss against Andrew Brydges, last graded 96. Of course this was bad enough, but the manner of the loss - quickly gaining a winning position as black on account of his anodyne opening, missing a win and getting into an equal ending, outplaying him again and getting to a won position again before making a beginner's oversight - made it very hard to take:
As a result of that, I found myself near the bottom of the tournament. For the fourth round, I had white against another junior, Michael Freeman (43/1180). Unfortunately for him, I wanted to take out my frustration at the previous game on someone!
The run of young opponents continued into round 5, where I had black against Pramoth Ragavan (116/1481). It was a Sämisch KID, and for once I didn't lose miserably! Quite the reverse, in fact:
Unfortunately, my gathering momentum was cut off in the sixth round. Once again I had white against Dominic Warner (at 130/1570, he is clearly under-graded for this speed, but I should still have been favourite.) A few silly oversights spoilt my position and his hopes for "third time lucky" were fulfilled:
So much for my hopes of a late surge; if I'd got to 4/6 then who knows? Instead, in the final round I played another Sussex junior, Juju Samworth-Calvier (113). He opted to try the Closed Sicilian, a line I've never rated all that highly. In this game white's attack never got started and black cruised to victory even with a few positional miscues of his own:
That was my tournament - a 132 grading performance and a loss of 13 Elo. Even ranged alongside my many spectacular failures in individual tournaments, it was my worst showing for quite some time. The simple explanation is that I make oversights with depressing regularity - and I make them even more often with little time. The net result is that I'm just not as good at rapidplay as at slower time controls! Throwing away my positions from rounds 3 and 6 is almost normal for this speed, but that doesn't make it any easier to take.
It's a shame, because at times I was playing quite well. Admittedly, given the grading differential in most of the rounds (+45, -52, +52, +105, +32, +18, +35) I had a lot of games where I wasn't really put under pressure - though I still managed to lose one of them! - so could just play my game. Nevertheless I was quite pleased with my wins in rounds 5 and 7. They were sharp, but I took control and prosecuted smoothly. Incidentally it's strange to have scored 3/4 with black but only 1/3 with white! That said, I might well have won every game except for round 2, a reasonable enough exception.
I must admit that this result has dented my enthusiasm for rapid chess somewhat. Coming home after a mediocre result and knowing you have to annotate seven games is rather depressing, and in these notes I tried to only focus on the really glaring mistakes as well as the openings. That's why the usual flood of ?!s is nowhere to be seen. I don't know when my next rapidplay event will be, and I'm also not sure if I will just blog slowplay games in future. We'll find out one day...
I couldn't exactly dwell on the disappointment though - the next day was the U-18 event mentioned above, and the day after that was round 5 of the Summer Cup: my last game of the grading list.
* Amazingly, I ended up with the job of deciding the board orders - this can be a delicate business but I broke with the habit of a lifetime and went in grade order. Somehow in the U-18 Minor section, Surrey's three teams finished in reverse order!
No comments:
Post a Comment