A learning experience

February was a dense month of chess for me, with 8 games - Castles' penultimate match of the Croydon League season was the seventh. We were hosting West Wickham B, and I had black on board 2 against Andrew Ponting (174). Like a pleasing number of the matches, it seemed like a close battle in the offing - 181-184, 167-174, 133-126, 50-122.

Curiously, this was my first encounter in a serious game with one of the major variations of the Sicilian Defence - the Sveshnikov. Facing a specialist, for once I felt obliged to duck a theoretical duel and play something insipid. And it should have worked! But you have to stick your neck out to win games...

It was an undistinguished loss in the end (1-3; DDLL) and particularly undistinguished for me. The fact that you can't find an immediate way to cash in doesn't mean that your positional understanding is faulty: it hasn't suddenly become viable to let White reach such a textbook good knight vs. bad bishop endgame. It should be - and is - quite a routine task to convert. That's especially so when the game would be adjudicated shortly afterwards - letting Black escape with a draw was a very naïve thing to do. But I was knocked off course by an instinctive fear of 'damaging' my good position by pushing f4, as well as the nagging awareness that I couldn't move my knight away from d5 (so as to pressure d6) without it being chopped off. Fundamentally, it was a lazy unwillingness to work everything out.

This turned out to be my last Croydon League game of the season - I was on board 1 for the last match, but my opponent no-showed as we ran out 3-1 winners for a solid mid-table finish. So now is as good a time as any to reflect. I mentioned recently that I've been involved in a demographics initiative in Surrey, and part of my work was about young people playing league chess. Running this team has shaped some of my thinking: we entered the team partly as a test, and as we feared it proved inordinately difficult to get 4-board teams together. Frankly I think that evening league chess is in terminal decline - the writing is on the wall when only 8% of Surrey League games are played by under-25s. Playing on weeknights makes no sense if you're in education or even in work, and 3-hour games are inevitably of low quality, especially with tiredness added into the mix. This season I've been gradually worn down by consistently getting home from a bad game at midnight, and at some point it just became a case of fulfilling my obligations - those games feel like a chore now. Next season I will focus on weekend events, to which the future belongs.

And a weekend game it was that rounded out my February showing. An unexpected 22nd birthday present came in the shape of my first call-up for the county Open team.