Recently my score with white has been immense, but some of my positions out of the opening have been more convincing than others. This was certainly one of the less impressive examples, caused as usual by overambition. But it's worth remembering that the struggle in chess embraces all three phases of the game, and by setting my sights on a longer victory than normal I scored a nice positional win, albeit helped by some missed defensive opportunities.
My first reaction when asked how the game went was "oh, it was awful - I had to play positionally." This was just a joke though! I could squeeze without black offering anything in return, and even when trying to enjoy my games as much as possible, it would have been less satisfying to win by a bansai attack from a position that clearly demands a more mature treatment. In any case, whether you are trying to praise my play to the heavens or tear it to shreds, there is a lot that can be gleaned from this game.
For no other reason than that I did things the other way round for the last game, I'll take the problems first. It will shock no-one to discover that they centre around calculation; indeed this issue even jeopardised my unusually competent endgame technique. I was missing some important tactical ideas (the answer to 14... Ne6?? after 11... O-O, for instance, or the consequences of 29... Rh1+) but mostly the problem continues to be that I am not looking for them: I tend to stop calculating too early in a line, and subconciously filter out a lot of moves such that they just don't exist as candidates. Rejecting moves because they look wrong can lead to some bothersome omissions (17. c4 and 21. Ng5 being the most obvious examples) and when you take all of these lazy shortcuts you're just setting yourself up to miss things. Consider the variations after 9. exd5 Nxd5 10. O-O!, when black dare not win a pawn on c3. But it 'had' to be defended, so I never looked at possible refutations, much less the possibility of letting it be taken. Away from this most unoriginal of ailments, my time management was again unimpressive (11. Bxc6+ didn't need 25 minutes, 40. Kg3? didn't need five, and 64. Kg7 certainly didn't need two) and so I had to play another ending short of time. One positional misjudgement stood out: I thought that an ending with both sides have connected passed pawns offered him counterplay, but when white's pawns have reached the fifth rank and black's are still on the seventh this doesn't really apply.
I did win though; black's passive defence helped to be sure, but there were some good moments for me. In contrast with the previous game, I couldn't just go for it here but nevertheless played a nice positional game. Perhaps it's a welcome legacy of turning my white repertoire upside down last season that I could channel aggression into a quiet position, and it is this energy that is the key. Back then I started to regularly play in a positional vein, but it meant taking all the drive out of my game; now I can have my cake and eat it in such a situation. I don't try to play like this, but it's still a good thing to have in the toolbox when I'm forced to call upon it: even when trying to have fun, I'm too much of a competitor for anything other than victory to be the aim of the game! Later in the game, whilst I should never have allowed black to reach it, I was very pleased to convert the 3 vs. 2 Rook ending and especially after my meltdown against Crouch. I had never come across Botvinnik's win against Najdorf until I annotated this game, but nevertheless I conjured up much the same procedure and with only a few minutes left. Really I didn't think about h4-h5 at all; it just felt right. This is why I find it so hard to diagnose my endgame play - who else could intuit a long-winded plan so accurately, 48 hours after getting mated two pawns up in another Rook ending? Deep positional insights and laughable oversights exist hand-in-hand, though this is an important insight in itself. Even endgames can be tactical sometimes...
I put a lot of energy into this game (perhaps too much) but for me it was only the warm-up. My game soon after in the evening section would probably decide who won the tournament, and turned out to be another long struggle.
No comments:
Post a Comment