We left the action in mid-February, just before the third 4NCL weekend of the season. This time I had to play on both days because of poor availability (supposedly Valentine's weekend constitutes some sort of excuse) which meant a potentially awkward encounter on the Saturday with the recently rebranded CSC Dragons - they now carried the name of the charity whose head office I work for! They were languishing at the bottom of the table, and so we targeted this as a must-win to get into the promotion pool. It would be more of a challenge than it should have been - 199-205, 193-205, 189-186, 189-186, 192-171, 173-175, 164-174, 167-176 - but we felt we could do it.
I was on board 8, against Louise Head (176/1937) and decided to draw hope from our game in August. Typically, I found myself grovelling for a draw in a better position, but for once I survived to report my scorn. That said, I was outplayed in the early stages of that game, so the warning signs were there if I'd chosen to heed them. This time we got the sort of quiet position she wanted, and though it was balanced for longer than I knew, there was an air of inevitability about the end result:
Typically, we inched over the line 4½-3½ (DDDDDWWL), which remarkably left us leading the pool with two matches to go. We were within touching distance - but not there yet. Still, I was downcast in the evening: this was my first loss of the year, and one that I'd had plenty of chances to avoid. Nunn complained in his Best Games book of a loss to Ulf Andersson in which he "went straight for my little toe" - and this felt similar.
Like most of Black's exciting defences to 1. d4, the Semi-Slav suffers the defect that White can avoid it quite easily. The fact that he has an objectively good way to do it, the Slow Slav, is quite problematic. When preparing this line for a game at the Colin Crouch Masters a few weeks ago, I searched in vain for a direct solution to 5. b3 - the desperate 5... c5!? was the best I could think of. Perhaps I will have to admit defeat and try 4... Bf5, but I can't say I like the ensuing positions. Problems, problems as ever...
Still, I got a decent position after the slip on move 10, and we must look to the middlegame to explain what happened. I think that the two most important mistakes were 14... Qe7 and 25... Rxd5, because they typify my wariness of changing the position - and that comes from fear. In the first case, I passed over the obvious line because I imagined White's compensation to be much greater than it really was; in the second, I didn't really consider the correct recapture at all, because I refused to look beyond the structural weakness of the IQP. And yet I complain that my opponents are too solid! This was all made worse by my inability to handle even mild time trouble - clearly 32... Rd6?? was unfortunate, but I completely fluffed my defence from move 19 onwards.
But I'll say more on the clock when I cover the following day's game...
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