I wouldn't have expected Bristol to be on the first table by the penultimate round of the BUCA Championship, but it had been an excellent first day. Now we played Cambridge, who were out to end a long drought of success in this competition. Afterwards, someone on their team told me that they're largely made up of elitists who would enter to win or not at all - and indeed, judging by their Varsity team the following weekend, they were almost at full strength, which is certainly more than we could say! Even compared to the Edinburgh match, we were laughably out-gunned: 212f-241, 164-221, 147-207f, 130-199. All we wanted was to avoid a repeat of our 0-4 whitewash last year...
The only thing I knew beforehand about my 221-graded opponent Richard Weaving was that he is in the same academic year as me, but I had been able to get a bit of preparation done in the morning. In such cases, you can't hide from the fact that it's going to be a difficult game, but you might as well go to the board knowing you've done all you can. I didn't expect anything particularly explosive in the opening, but I was very wrong: he came out with a speculative sideline that soon exploded into one of the strangest games I have played in a long time:
We met our target by losing 1-3 (WLLL) - that win, smoothly outplaying another IM with black, earnt our top player the board 1 gold, the only thing to slip through Cambridge's fingers all weekend. Now they have something to play for next year! The rest of us kept to the script, but you can't say I didn't have chances.
I am still not sure if Weaving's opening choice was the result of divine inspiration or an ungodly hangover, but either way I remain unconvinced. You may well say that Tal won plenty of games like this, reasoning that his opponents couldn't possibly work their way through all the complications, and that's true, but I still believe there's a lot to be said for seeking the objectively best moves! He took a lot of risks here. I suppose I'm just the sort of person you should be aiming for brilliancies against: I can miss tactical ideas, but I am stubbornly principled and always insist on being shown. Even so, I took black's play as a bit of an insult, but maybe that's just me. No matter - everyone has their own approach to the game.
If we're looking for lessons, the game shows once again that if you enter/get dragged into sharp complications, it can only take one missed detail. If the mating threats on move 12 don't make 10... Nxh2! work then black is staring down a dead end, but they do, and I overlooked them when deciding to take the Rook, with fatal consequences. But on the other hand, when in trouble, keep hanging in there! Even someone as strong as Weaving switched off badly once he got to a winning position - a lot of tactics went unnoticed, but 28... Kg7?? is particularly gruesome. Once that was gone, he finally took over once and for all, but more often than not there is a chance somewhere.
If I was going to get spectacularly wiped out in one game of this event, I didn't really mind - it made a change from everyone complaining about how dull my draw was, and it happened in a game that was broadcast online. 221s are good players after all. Apparently the god of pairings enjoyed the game very much - it was our top board's turn to rotate out for the final round, and that meant that I played another 221! In its own way, that game turned out to be even stranger than this one.
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