Back in the saddle

I've threatened it for several years, but 2016 was the first time that I went to the British Championships as a player rather than a spectator. Unable to qualify for the Championship itself, I opted for the Major Open and a fairly leisurely pace of one long game each afternoon; some of the braver souls in the section also played in morning events, but in the end 11 games was bad enough! I settled into a nice routine of blogging the day's play and looking up my next opponent in the evenings, preparing in the mornings, then solving a few positions from Tactimania before making the 20-minute walk to the venue and getting a sandwich along the way. That left me with roughly an hour to clear the mind.

The first round, which feels like a distant memory but was barely a fortnight ago, saw me playing with white against Mark Talbot (189/2027). Along with his brother, he'd done well in the Major Open last year, and I couldn't see many obvious weaknesses to target; it's more local events that seem to drag him down. Sometimes his openings go wrong, but it's hard to play serve-and-volley chess against the Petrov! But then, I never need an invitation to be well-prepared, and resolved to do what I could. And in fact I got a pleasant position out of the opening. After that, however, my lack of practice showed through, and I went down quite feebly:

Several points arise from this, I think. Firstly, I'm often worried by how quickly my form worsens if I don't play. Time management is always my worst sin here (imagine a computer when it first starts up) but overall quality usually dips too. Thankfully it wasn't as bad as at King's Place though; I could at least calculate a bit, and I only hung one pawn...

To me, the two most interesting moves are 18. Rd2 and 21. a4. The first shows that I forgot about the foundational principle that you must develop all of your pieces; the f1 rook faced a sorry time after that, and apart from a momentary bid for freedom it stayed there for the rest of the game. Obviously I'm well aware that this principle exists, but application of knowledge is what really counts. Psychologically, 21. a4 is more telling, although I could dig up many similar examples from my games if I had to: I get a strong intuitive feeling that a bold move of some kind is right, but I can't bring myself to play it because of a fear of committal decisions. After all, what if I didn't get the pawn back...? Perhaps there's an observation bias, but it seems that my intuition turns out to have been right almost every time. This was one of them, and a disappointing one at that since I knew that the course I followed instead was a bleak one.

Losing is never painless (quite the reverse) but I had to be realistic; with so little recent practice, the first round was always going to be tough. But I had been able to think about chess again, and 40 moves was a decent run-out. Round 2 would be a fresh start, and I hoped to be up to speed.