Since I'm usually recruited for London League matches on the day, I took a straw poll in the office on what time the call would come - in the end it was about 3:45pm. This was for Drunken Knights 3 against Mushrooms, on board 5. Considering that this was Division 2, the strength of the league is obvious: 198-206, 191-193, e175-203, 170-184, 168-172, 164-166, e160-168, 155-157, 129-166, 115-150. I was playing Johan Rydahl (172), and had yet another black, my sixth in a row for slowplay games. But my black openings are actually working very well at the moment, and this was to be a dramatic success, not to mention a badly needed one. It's not often that the walk to a game lasts longer than the game itself:
My brief appearance didn't really help the team, since we're currently 3-6 down* (L?LWWLLDLD). It was a vital boost for me though. Of course there is no real skill involved in winning such a game, but I needed to get some confidence back somehow, and I could have won this in any condition.
If you're not planning to go near the Botvinnik System with a barge pole, then you probably zoned out of the annotations, but they make the point that there is rather a lot to learn. (That said, there are recurring patterns, and the position doesn't look quite as bizarre as it did when I first saw it.) White seemed to be feeling his way through from quite early on, but such an attitude doesn't fit with 5. Bg5, a principled move but one that must be justified. This was a nice reward for doing some work, but, perhaps like my strong results with 1. d4 d5 in general, I wonder if it's just because everything is relatively fresh in my mind. It's a bit of a last hurrah for having infinite study time, truth be told.
Nevertheless, the long-awaited win was there at last - now the challenge was to show it wasn't a blip. Inevitably, the chance wasn't long in coming, for my next game was just two days later.
* Yes, there is one thing slower than my blogging, and that's the arrangement of adjourned games...
No comments:
Post a Comment