A cheapo merchant strikes

Although I played that Ellam Trophy game, and I've (finally) been learning to drive for the last few weeks as well, I think I made good use of my week off work, if only to get back to fighting fitness. (I spent much of it working on a Dvoretsky/Yusupov book on calculation and complicated position - we shall soon see how well that worked!) I was feeling pretty good ahead of the Easter weekend, for which I entered the open section of the CCF Easter Congress. Although I would have liked to play in an event offering British Championship qualification, I wasn't willing to travel to Southend for the privilege, so I had to go with it in spite of a history of failure at this tournament. This time though I was in for a Saturday-night bye, which I hoped would ameliorate things.

This time I was in the top half of the seeding - CCF is the place to go if you want to play under-rated juniors, and it occurred to me that I'd be doing well if I could avoid damage to my own rating here. And lo, in the first round I had white against Darshan Kumaresan (165/1773). We've played a fair number of games in the last few years; although I have a perfect score in slowplay games, rapid and blitz has been much more competitive.* He is improving rather quickly, but everyone is prone to bad form and I was able to take advantage of it:

Normally I'm the one who misses all of the tactics! Games in the Closed Ruy Lopez really play on your nerves, even if they are often outwardly calm: they are very complex, and unfold very slowly, which gives you a lot to think about - and to worry about. Throw in some time trouble in a winning position for good measure and I'm sure the reader can appreciate that this wasn't as breezy a performance as it looks.

Although I was aware of lessons that could be drawn from my earlier games in this opening, I didn't apply them very well, hence my poor decisions on moves 14 and 16. I also lost the thread of the game for a moment at move 20, largely because 20. Nf5! just didn't exist for me, but my opponent fell into my childish trap and I got away with it. It's not a passage of play I'm proud of, but I suppose weekenders are often scrappy affairs.

The second round shunted me up to the top board, and promised a real test of whether my efforts to improve in complicated positions had achieved anything.


* Although that's true against many - I was somewhat surprised to realise on the Easter Monday Blitz at the same venue that I could no longer play my normal openings at such a speed! After two horrible losses I switched to the English and Caro-Kann, which fixed the problem...