Though I would describe myself as an aggressive player, I'm basically positional - and not at all a natural king-hunter. But sometimes your hand is forced as in this game, when I found myself sacrificing two pawns in the opening, not entirely on purpose. I had to start hacking, which laid bare my strengths and weaknesses alike:
That was a very difficult game to analyse. The computer is quite slow to grasp how serious the compensation is (albeit faster than I was at the time!) so I'm sure that I haven't discovered all of the game's secrets. Even so, the lessons are clear enough. Black's positional concessions in the Winawer are very serious, and White is entitled to extraordinary measures in order to prove it. But for me, it was an archetypal failure.
On the plus side, my feel for dynamics is pretty good - although with the games of Alekhine, Tal, Nunn and others sitting on the shelf behind me, I would certainly hope so! Seasoned readers will know how often I reject moves because I can't accept my instinct - but I'm gaining the self-belief to trust it, as with my 11th move. After blundering a second pawn I might have gone into meltdown, but instead stayed calm, played the position and gradually discovered its potential. For as long as the game depended on intuition, I convincingly outplayed Pollack - perhaps he could have defended better, but in a practical game no-one would find it easy.
The decisive moment always requires calculation though, which is why I've failed to put away so many games over the years. The horror show against Jain a few weeks earlier is just the most recent example. Adjusting to look for quiet moves is notoriously difficult, but I shouldn't have settled for second-best so easily - it's strange to say, but I'm not sure I really understood how good the position was by move 30!
Round 4 was another white and, would you believe it, another fight in the French. But it was also an afternoon round, a challenge I wasn't really fit for.
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