A string of absentees against a team always noted for its strength in depth is not usually good news, but their top two players were both missing, so it could have been worse. 212f-183, 164-184, 159-179, 149-185, 126f-161, 148-174 was the line-up, and since a lot of our players are undergraded, I thought we had chances. I was playing Derek Pugh (184) for the second time this season. I managed an inglorious draw in the previous meeting, but from that I was sure that I could keep up with him, even with black this time. His remarkable run of form hasn't slowed down, and he is still unbeaten with a 200+ performance, but I trusted my opening preparation.
People often tell me that the Caro-Kann is dull, but I have to disagree on the basis of my games - and this is an extreme case. The Streatham & Brixton Blog have TIFE (The Interesting French Exchange), but TICK is a much better acronym! This time I was taken out of preparation very early, but it didn't really matter: I certainly wasn't scared of the way he did it and soon had a commanding position. He pressed an unsound attack at all costs, and whilst it was objectively so bad that I was able to easily refute it over the board, it still set practical problems - not least on the clock - that proved just too much:
'Master of disaster' will be my chess epithet - yet strangely, I was almost indifferent about this game. By all accounts, I should have been furious - it cost us the match (2-4; WLLLWL) and shattered my precious unbeaten run in the league. Amazingly, it is my first loss with black in Bristol for almost two years! (That loss was against Horfield A, both of my losses last season were against Horfield A, this loss against Horfield A snapped my streak... what is it with those guys?) After thinking I'd botched it up as early as move 16, allowing a mate in two whilst a piece up really was a stupid way to lose it all. And yet, a friend who claims not to care about results at all was far more upset when he lost in a graded friendly match at the weekend. Maybe I am more laid-back than I give myself credit for?
You might say that losing to people graded 20 points higher with black is nothing out of the ordinary, but for 32 moves I completely outplayed him. His attack was just far too optimistic, and became increasingly desperate; black's best defensive moves are very simple to find. This is all despite my alarming inability to force myself to calculate, even in a situation when I knew it was absolutely necessary. Obviously, crazed attackers have significant practical advantages at this time control* and it seems that it is the practical players I usually come unstuck against. I'm not the best tactician around, to put it mildly, but for a very long time I kept on finding the right moves. Frustratingly, this may not be the right approach in evening league chess - finding them came at a price, and in time pressure everyone cracks sooner or later.
It would have been a very big ask to survive the whole season without losing a game, playing the second half of it permanently on the top boards. So maybe it is good to get it out of the way early in the term: now there really is no excuse not to push for wins! We're back in action next Thursday, in a must-win match against Clifton C, but before then I'm making a cameo appearance this weekend in the 4NCL.
* At the risk of it sounding like sour grapes, I think this game shows yet again that an increment in the Bristol League is well overdue. The proposal failed last season, basically because some people unashamedly view the clock as the 33rd piece and openly stated their desire to win games on time. To which the counter-argument is: a) grow up; b) a small (5/10-second) increment still makes it very difficult to play complex positions - see my adventures at BUCA last year - but you can at least try; c) chess is too hard to play out in 90 minutes - time scrambles are too common to be blamed on collective bad time management; d) do people really want competitions to be decided by whether a player can do a KQ-K mate in his last 10 seconds, as the Bristol Knockout Final was last season? I'm leaving Bristol at the end of the season so I have no personal interest any more, but I hope they see sense.
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