Carpe diem!

 I've been playing a lot more rapid chess this season, partly to try and remedy my frequent time-trouble travails, but mainly because I can. So I decided not to worry about possible fatigue or incurring yet more blogging commitments, and played in the Rapidplay Open at CCF in early January. However, this was an Open with a difference - by FIDE ratings at least I was the third seed! (I was a bit lower by ECF grades, but I knew 148 was set to leap up.)The top section of the SCCU Championship was on that weekend, which took any interested 180+ locals out of contention. I didn't give it too much attention beforehand, since I was sure someone strong would notice and leap at the easy pickings - but they didn't, and I knew that I couldn't hope to get another chance like this.

I'm blogging these games two months to the day after they were played, and with so much to catch up on, it became an easy decision to rush through this tournament. To mark the occasion though, they are all here, and I have annotated one game in a little more depth; the other six get the brusque treatment that rapid chess probably deserves.

Just as in the last CCF Rapidplay I entered, I started with black against David Everitt. This was much shakier though; I positionally outplayed him but lost control completely in a time scramble. Luckily I didn't record and couldn't reconstruct that far, so only a relatively smooth middlegame survives, damaged only by my lengthy delay in getting the thematic ...d5 break in:

The second seed took a bye, and the top seed lost, so that put me on board 1 - the right side of it for once! - where I stayed until the end. I played another unsteady game against Barry Miles, but gladly took what I was offered and quickly progressed to 2/2:

My third round game was probably the most difficult, against James Cole, the highest seed by ECF (171). It was my third English Attack within a month, and this one was much scrappier than the first two - but I escaped:

However, in the meantime his father Graham Cole had moved into the sole lead on 3/3. I would have to win to order with white, and I did so - via a lost middlegame and an ending that should have been drawn:

That restored me to the joint lead. It was shared only with the second seed, Matthew Shaw, who'd reached 3.5/4 after skipping the first round. Luckily his colour sequence gave me a double white - and I used it to full effect in a game interesting enough that I annotated it properly:

Even with a half-point lead I wasn't home yet though. The downfloats were kicking in, and so I played the top seed David Millward with black despite two losses having taken him out of contention. Perhaps that was why he didn't try harder to punish my carelessness after frittering away a good opening:

That meant it came down to the top two boards in the final round (unfortunately the other one was Cole vs Cole, but to be fair they played a full-blooded game.) I didn't enjoy getting paired with Tim Crouch, since I seem to be cursed when playing him - I've never beaten him, despite getting a won position in every game we've played! Yet again he slipped through my fingers thanks to a combination of jitters and carelessness, but it was enough to share first prize:

So, was this an opportunity lost or snatched? Naturally I'd prefer to have won outright, and I probably should have done on the basis of head-to-head results. Only the last round, which as usual had its own laws, denied me that small bonus. But I still scored 5½/7 as the only unbeaten player in the tournament, performed at 167 (170 if we fast-forward to new grades) and gained 20.8 Elo. And, of course, I won an Open tournament! The weakest one around for a while to come, but they all count as far as I'm concerned. I wasn't top seed, and it certainly wasn't a walkover.

£50 to the good, it was a happy journey back. My lingering fear was that I'd soon regret spending the energy, but with 10 days until the next game I had a chance to recover. Then it was time to resume my remarkable London League campaign.