Once was enough?

 For round two, I really was in the U-18/21 Open, and on the top boards thanks to my full-point bye in the morning. There I found myself with black against Anthony Zhang (187/2085), a junior from Berkshire. Recently FIDE have raised the k-factor for U-18s to 40, and subsequently his rating has jumped up from a plateau in the 1800s. Some of us are not so lucky! Last season he lost a promising position against a 197-graded teammate of mine in the 4NCL; from that and a few other games I had come to the conclusion that he is a strong, solid player, but one who might lose his way in a complicated position. My own aims for the opening were therefore obvious.

 It's an established tradition of mine to steal ideas from my fellow bloggers a few miles up the road in Streatham, and the title of this post is one of them. Their series is about opening lines that they played once and then never again, and the opening from this game may or may not share the same fate. Recently I have been having a crisis of confidence in the King's Indian, and so I decided - if only for variety's sake - to try something else in this tournament. (That's not to say I am giving up the KID altogether, for I am not.) Quite a few of my prospective opponents play 1. d4/2. Nf3/3. c4, a move order that for once made me optimistic that I might get to play a long-time favourite of mine that never quite makes it to my board, the Blumenfeld Gambit. Black gets a strong centre and more space, it is sharp and imbalanced, and it is also quite obscure - all very appealing. So I went to the trouble of preparing it, and sure enough it appeared in my first game of the event! Sadly the good news ended there:

 That was a disappointment. I waited a long time to play a Blumenfeld, and this debaçle wasn't what I'd had in mind. It's a shame, because I really want the underlying concept to work - and indeed I think it does in its pure form. The problem is that, at the end of the day, it's still a sort of Benoni, and one in which black has prematurely loosened his Queenside at that. I don't have anything convincing against 5. Bg5, and if even 5. e4!? can work then clearly black has some problems. It's a fun idea for a rainy day, but as Julian Hodgson said of the Blackmar-Diemer, it's probably not an opening to pay the mortgage with. Still, I can't quite bring myself to let go of it - when I have time, I will have to try and patch over some of the holes.

 I alluded to this game at the end of the notes - the middlegame moved me to wonder what might have been if I'd achieved a playable position from the opening. It sounds determinist but I really do think that some smarter opening choices would do a lot of good. Afterwards I played Zhang in a blitz game; I had white in a Ruy Lopez and totally crushed him. Blitz is blitz, of course, and he said he hasn't played that opening before, but the magnitude of the turnaround was what struck me.



 As I said against Peat though, it's not all the choice of opening. My adventures with ...Na6-b4 and ...Bd6-f4 showed a very strange fixation with random attacks on his Queen that ultimately only resulted in me retreating and so losing any time gained. The decision to spice things up rather than make positional concessions with ...c4 might be laudable psychologically, but objectively it is wrong and rests only on a forgotten tactical detail. Sometimes grim defence really is the only way, although I admit that black's position is already going downhill by then. The final nail in the coffin was 36... Qh4+?? - a move I made without thinking, allowing white's oversight to pass unnoticed. Presumptious though it may be to criticise the convincing tournament winner, his conversion (of an immaculate opening, to be fair) could have been better: 17. Nb5 and 23. Bf1 seemed too forgiving at the time, leaving aside 34. Rg2, 41. f5 and especially 35. Nh2??. Eventually you have to pull the trigger and go into tactical lines.

 So after the first day, I was on 1/2. Undoubtedly flattering, but I had escaped for another tournament the nightmare possibility of scoring nothing (the thought is always there!) My adventures with dubious openings were now over for the event - but I was to be on both sides of a few more opening disasters just yet...