On and on and on

The last week of November was a busy one: I had league matches for Castles on Monday and Wednesday, before taking a half-day off work to go and play in the Bristol Winter Congress. With hindsight, this wasn't a fantastic idea with the London Chess Classic just a week away, but apparently I'm more optimistic than I realise. It began on Monday, with Castles travelling to Crystal Palace for a Croydon League match.

Although chess club venues are rarely anything special (Kingston's sojourn in their local ASDA perhaps taking the biscuit), this was certainly one of the worst examples - we were in the archetypal church hall, almost no other people were there, and on the cusp of Winter it was absolutely freezing. At least the chess was a bit more fiery, since this was a close match: 171-182, 168-166f, 134-138, 117-134. I had white on 2, against Jude Ranga. He is a new player, and they only gave an estimate of 135 - but estimates are rarely worth anything, so all I could do was wait and see. Only later did I discover his 1942 FIDE rating, admittedly inactive for a few years. But it makes little difference - I could have lost to anyone playing like this:

It's never nice to feel like you're a liability to your team. After my third loss in a row restricted us to a 2-2 draw (WLLW), what else could I think? It was the same back when Castles were in the Stoneleigh Trophy, but at least I had the odd morale-booster there. Here it is just misery.

One of the challenges of blogging my games at the moment is trying to stay original in the face of relentless disaster. Throughout October and November I was playing terribly in game after game. In fact, I was making a series of mistakes that no-one of anything like my strength should ever make. 12. Bg3?? and 37. Bxc4?? are the culprits in this game - one arose from a pathetic miscalculation, and the other from positional brain-fade. If I'd known then what I know now, I would probably have played 3. Nd2, which worked beautifully in my previous French battle, but I don't really know it that well, and I'm not convinced that white gets any noteworthy advantage if black plays correctly.

Perhaps I could have analysed this game more deeply, but I'm not sure how much point there is, since I was so out of sorts. I played badly and was lured into the sort of position I can mishandle at the best of times - the result isn't that surprising. And besides, there's so much to catch up on! Although there are two congresses ahead of us, I've now got up to my penultimate league game of 2015. It was certainly one of the silliest.