Breaking the Lalic Rule

With round 9, it definitely felt like the end was approaching. Whilst the Championship was all-but sealed by this stage, there were plenty of hungry players left in the Major Open, not least the two leaders who eventually finished on a remarkable 10½ and 10 out of 11. Lower down, I was enjoying some momentum at last with two wins and a draw from the last three games, and obviously hoped to continue that form. I had black against Alex Bullen (185/2045) - a tough one on paper, but his results in the afternoons hadn't been good and I could smell an upset.

Instead we got a rather prosaic game, in which I sacrificed a pawn, didn't play accurately enough to get compensation for it, and lost. But explaining why this inveterate materialist played a forgotten gambit is another story - I flouted one of the most valuable things I learned in chess:

My usual response to the Lalic Rule has been 'fine, I'll just learn all the theory then' - principled, but gloriously impractical. No-one can really do that, and 8... Nd5!? was really a case of me being too clever for my own good. I was trying to dodge whatever preparation he'd done for 8... Ng8 - the contrast with round 6 is telling - but I don't fear such a strategy when the boot is on the other foot, since it often just exposes ignorance. That's exactly what happened - I remembered this nice idea of sacrificing a pawn to open the queenside, but I didn't know how to follow up. It's very close to being sound (11. O-O-O looks like the biggest threat to me) but in the end I suspect that Bullen knew my 'surprise' line better than me after all. So perhaps his move order worked, not because it trapped me in an inferior position but because of the psychological impact. I wanted to 'prove' that I hadn't been outsmarted in the part of the game that I view as home turf.

That left just two games to go. My round 10 pairing sounded very kind when I heard it, and once more only a win would do.