Raising the curtain

For various reasons, I think that traditional weeknight club chess is in terminal decline - my generation just isn't interested. (Although they don't play much at all - in my academic year group there are just 24 active players, and I'm below the median grade.) A small club like Wallington needs to be more imaginative, and I decided to organise a couple of events to start off our season, which will be covered in the next two posts. We may have gained a couple of new members out of it, but time will tell if this is really enough.

Anyway, for our first club night of the season we got our local IM to give a simul. Faithful readers of this blog will have come across Graeme Buckley before: a sharp attacker who plays purely for fun, he was the obvious choice. He even suggested doing a clock simul for added carnage - it did his results no good, but as he predicted it was a lot more enjoyable.

Even by the standards of a 2-hour game, this encounter was of meagre quality: I was surprised in the opening, made an appalling strategic error but prevailed simply by denying him a forced win and running him out of time. But I wanted to have a closer look at the opening, and it was a titled scalp...

I think that my fifth move is best explained as pride coming before the fall - with my usual disdain for offbeat openings, I didn't want to admit that White had equalised and preferred to muddy the waters. Normally my dynamic judgement is fairly good, but in this case I lost objectivity. The principles of chess hold good, and Black should be able to get a good game if he has done his homework, but 1. b4 is not outright damaging. It's just not the best move. Things got even worse for me when I castled into the fire of White's pieces, and whilst 14... f5 was a good pragmatic choice it should have been much too late in the day. The chess soon ended though, to be replaced by clock-bashing, and the tension between the rooks on the g-file was resolved in my favour. White's chances finally disappeared when I was able to lock down the a-file.

A game for the archivists only then. This miserable play continued into my next tournament appearance, at the last Golders Green Rapidplay at its venue of 27 years: I blundered away good positions in at least 3 games and finished with only 1½/6. Thankfully it all got more interesting over the next two weeks, when I ran a graded Wallington Rapidplay Championship. After this inauspicious start to the club season I was surprised to play some decent chess!