As one life ends...

 In the 'interregnum' between my degree and starting a job, I had as much time for chess as I wanted. Even during the Bristol years, my study hours were flexible enough to accommodate league fixtures with ease, hence my spectacular feats of preparation. But after this game, I would have to wave goodbye to those advantages and slip into the world of full employment.

 I was signing off with white against Roger de Coverly (186/1992), whose name will be only too familiar to anyone who reads the English Chess Forum. But, since I do read it, I knew a few things about him: he prefers aggressive mainlines, usually chooses 1... e5, and is a very active player. Still, I had to be happy with this pairing: the last game went on for a very long time, so the arbiters did a provisional draw in which I had black against a 210. This was a friendlier pairing, but still not easy. I'm not one to shirk a theoretical challenge either, so we inevitably went into a sharp mainline; I knew a bit more and had my chances, but ultimately got outplayed:

 To be honest, I think that my play was a little bit naïve. It's been a while since I looked at any Marshall lines, and I am not strong enough to solve all the problems by myself. That's most obvious from a tactical perspective, where I allowed the unorthodox 21... Qe8! and missed obvious chances to pressure d5, as well as allowing a decisive break-in and then a mate at the end, but it is also strategic. I gave away tempi a little too liberally (18. Bxd5+?!, 29. Qd1??) and woefully underestimated the importance of my bad dark-squared Bishop - admittedly a failing shared by the computer! I should not have been surprised by 23... Bxf3 or 24... Re4, but I didn't consider them at all: it's easy enough to see the damage once it's on the board, but also too late by then. Yet more proof if it were needed that I must work on defending against the initiative; black's opening choice was very shrewd.

 As I said in round 1, my main aim in playing this tournament was to get a start-of-season warm-up without my usual 140 performance at the Jessie Gilbert Festival that wrecks any attempt to push on in the rest of the grading list. I achieved that (171 performance, +14.4 Elo) and in fact I wasn't playing too badly. Round 5 was a particularly important breakthrough. Of course, what matters is carrying that form into the start of the regular season.

 My next games were at CCF: I have entered their club rapid/blitz championships this year, which are Swiss events over 5 weeks during the season. The first rounds were played just under a fortnight ago, but with a single-section Open where I am 5th seed (!) I had a big grading advantage in every game, and none of them really merits publishing. So I will now move onto my first league game as a working man, which ironically enough was my first Surrey League appearance for Castles in over 3 years.