Off the mark

Whenever I play in a tournament, my first target is simply to score something. Modest perhaps, but I can't imagine what a wipeout would do to my confidence. After the previous day's reversal, that goal was suddenly on my mind, for I still got a challenging pairing. I was playing another of the visiting foreign contingent, this time a 2104-rated teenager from the Netherlands named Daniil Kolodkin. He seemed to be on the way up, for the most recent game I had to look at in preparation was an easy draw with a GM.

That preparation didn't do me much good, and I was sufficiently put out that I went my own way in the opening as early as move 7. The result was an original but difficult position. Whether through sheer stubbornness or my opponent's bad form, I finally managed to break my bonds in mutual time trouble and get on the scoreboard - although once again it could have been more:

There seemed to be a little bit of Korchnoi about my play in this game: writhing around in the opening and putting all of my pieces on the wrong squares, clinging on, fearlessly grabbing a pawn and then, in time trouble, arranging a counter-attack from the most hopelessly disorganised-looking position. But then that's how I always play such positions! It is the sign of a very strong player to be able to keep absolute control of the defender's counterplay - then again, it is the sign of a sensible player to not routinely sacrifice 15 minutes on the clock at the start of each game...

I was interested to note that our postmortem was one-way traffic. It's true that I'm often quite reserved, but it was obvious that he'd seen way more lines than I had. But only lines, not ideas: he had to calculate to convince himself that Ne6 was powerful, something which seemed obvious to me. And I remember how he evaluated the outcome of the opening: "you're just much worse here; it must be, like... +0.7". A little optimistic, but that's not the point. As a serial blogger, I've tried to keep alive the archaic practice of evaluating in words rather than numbers. The youth of today...!

Of course I should have played on and won, but I hope that at least my caution is understandable this time. Now that I had something in the bank, I would be back to try again... but not for two days, since in the interim I was coming to the rescue elsewhere.