The self-fulfilling prophecy

On balance, I think it's good to take a break from chess once in a while. Even I have other interests, and eventually you just need to recharge the batteries. But, for me at least, recovering my form on the other side is always painful. My holiday from chess this year ran from the end of the 4NCL at the start of May until last weekend, when I travelled to the picturesque village of Burcombe near Salisbury, for the semi-final of the U-180 Counties Championship: Surrey vs Devon. Although I'd played in a couple of blitz tournaments at CCF in the interim, I've come to the conclusion that fast time controls don't really help you keep your hand in, and in any case I did not play well. So, as nice as the pub lunch was in a corner of Wiltshire that time had forgotten, I was braced for an uncomfortable afternoon, with black on board 3 against 176-graded Mark Abbott.

Whilst many things have moved forward this season, I've noticed an unwelcome placebo effect too : if I think of some reason I won't play well, no matter how silly, I don't. Maybe I'm just so stubborn these days that I'll cut my nose off to spite my face - and I wonder if there's any other way to explain what happened in this game?

  

That makes three years in the last four when I've 'contributed' to a 7½-8½ loss in the national semi-final. You'd think they'd have dropped me by now! I seem to have become resigned to the idea that you have to make a blood sacrifice after a time away, and stuck to this policy despite White's best efforts to avoid it, first with his opening choice and then his shaky endgame play. I'm not really sure how I got into a lost position at all; as I said in the notes, I am prone to overreacting when I equalise too easily, and the early ...Na5-c4 was an ambitious treatment of the position, but was it really so bad? It all just feels a bit too random for me. My endgame play, right up to the moment when it actually mattered, was good on technical and psychological levels - in patches I did play a decent game.

But I played way too slowly in the early middlegame and, as so often, I was prone to ludicrous oversights. Missing 17. Ne5 is bad enough (it's both a fork and a forcing line!), but 23... d4? was even more careless and 41... Kb6?? is simply tragic. I'm not sure whether the last one was laziness, depression or rustiness, but I had kept up my routine on Chessity each weekday. There really is no substitute for regular play!

On Monday I played in the Croydon League's handicap blitz, which I usually excel in and almost won last year. But this time, just as in the aforementioned CCF blitzes, I was hanging things everywhere and collapsed from 3/4 to 4/9. Blitz has suddenly become very difficult for me. It might seem odd that I'm now set to play four rapid tournaments in as many weekends (Richmond, CCF, Bristol and King's Place) but I'm at the mercy of the tournament calendar. At least I won't be rusty ahead of the British this time round! I'm not sure how many of those rapid games I'll blog, but I'm sure there'll be something worth looking at soon.