Le passé d'une illusion

 I'm writing this post from Bristol, where I am making a brief return for a weekend tournament. I can confirm that it is raining. But our gloomy task today is to review a game I played a little under 4 weeks ago, in the CCF Superleague.

 Although results are of secondary importance for Castles, since we will almost certainly be relegated in any event, we'd still like to put up a fight, and this was one of our best chances of doing so. We were playing one of the other weaker teams Pawn Curry, and they had lost 2 of their top 3 players. Unexpectedly we had a grading advantage: 171-170, 168-131, 125-117, 117-113. Sadly things started to go wrong early, when one of our players no-showed. And it didn't go much better anywhere else, especially on my board. Naturally I viewed this game, black against Pramoth Ragavan (131/1571) as must-win, but my specious method turned out to be entirely the wrong one:

 That contributed to a 1½-2½ loss (DDLD) which did us no favours. Very much a lost opportunity, but as I said it's not something we will be weeping about. My game, on the other hand...

 Le Passé d'une Illusion is a book about the political left's loss of faith in communism's more idealistic early iterations. But this game was a similar moment for me. How exciting it was to think that I could play as many chess games as I could find, whilst combining that with the security of a full-time job. And how galling it is to finally accept that in fact I cannot: the strain is too great. I'm sure that a large part of it is exhaustion, not helped by captaincy duties or the enforced late nights. A worrying element is the growing problem of one-move blunders, but the tell-tale sign is that I can't think clearly. It's like trying to shift gears in a car and just grinding all the way through the box.

 I can't let the opening pass without comment either - perhaps this was the day the music died for the King's Indian. I was comprehensively outplayed because I don't have a feel for this sort of position. I'm too much of a control freak to be comfortable with the idea that one half of my position will inevitably collapse, and that it's all down to my time-limited counterplay on the other side of the board. I remembered our previous game, and believed that an imbalanced game gave me more winning chances, but in the end I needed to be myself. It's a learning process of course, but on the whole I think my dalliance with 1... d5 has gone rather well so far.

 Having effectively lost this game, but for the sort of draw offer I recognise only too well (it took less than 30 seconds of the post-mortem for him to realise what he'd done) I was starting to wonder if I could ever win a game under these conditions. Thankfully, the shot in the arm was finally around the corner, as I was presented with the sort of game I can win in any state - when my opponent brings a knife to a theoretical gunfight.