Must try harder

Round 8 then, and with two wins in a row I was looking to build some momentum in the second week. Winning the last four games would reach the Championship qualifying score! Here I was up against Aditya Verma (172/1908), a Kent junior who I've played several times before. I won our first game easily when he was very young, and then later the second and third - but they were from very difficult positions, and I hoped for a while that I had the Indian sign over him. Unfortunately I then lost our fourth game from a good position last year, and didn't get a good result anywhere for weeks afterwards. 3-1 still meant something to me though, and with white I was keen to make up for my misfiring preparation in the October loss.

Verma wasn't having any of that, and dodged the theoretical struggle early on. I went down a positional back alley in turn, and quickly started to outplay him. But doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will, and as usual I stalled in the face of resistance:

This tournament was quickly becoming a story of lost opportunities. In almost every game, it seemed, I was having good ideas but losing track of the details - or inventing details where they didn't exist. This is one of the more wasteful episodes: I looked at the system with 9. a4!? about 5 years ago and remembered concluding that it was quite promising, but beyond that I was flying blind, so it was a big success to emerge from the opening with such a big advantage - Verma was soon provoked into sacrificing a pawn for very little in an attempt to break his bonds.

The most instructive moment after that is probably 20. bxc3?, when I was, if anything, too confident about the position with his dark-squared bishop gone. I wanted to play for checkmate! But Black was able to tie me down enough to make that impossible, so I needed to kill his initiative off before doing anything else, which indicates the queen swap. On the mental side, look no further than the very end - I was ridiculously easy to push into allowing a repetition at the first sign of resistance. After seeing 30... Rc3 I could hardly force myself to calculate any further, and it's not that hard to see that the move is a very weak one. My attitude was lazy and unambitious - chess wouldn't be a very interesting game if you could win without any effort.

Now there were only three games to go. The ninth round looked like an interesting challenge to me, but from my point of view it never really got going.