A trademark game

I seem to be slipping behind again. I do have the excuse of my driving theory test (which I passed yesterday), and to my utter amazement I've been asked to coach a 150-graded 11-year-old - an interesting new experience, but it needs a lot of effort to do properly. Most of all though, I've been a bit dispirited by recent results. It's the usual story of good positions going begging, but at least the teams I'm playing for are doing well!

My first outing for Wallington this season was in the Alexander Cup, Surrey's main knockout competition. It's played over ten boards and a real test of depth as well as top-board strength, so we seemed to be struggling on both counts since I was on board one and we were down to 148 by board four. It looked especially bad when facing Redhill, which for many years has guaranteed a nasty mangling - but not any more. Some key personnel have lost interest, and they didn't even have anyone over 200, or indeed a tenth player. The match card still wasn't good reading though: 180-198, 161-192, 161-192, e148-175, e150-169, 152-161, 133-146, 137-143, 135-121, 120-Def.

I was playing Peter Kemp (198) with white. There's nothing in the database for him, and the only thing I knew was that he's a fellow Old Suttonian. It turned out to be the sort of game I've made my own: some fine-toothed opening analysis to get a controlled squeeze that was blown wildly off course as soon as my opponent confused the game:

Every so often Wallington pull a totally random scalp out of the bag, and this was up there with the best even against crippled opposition; upsets abounded as we whitewashed the bottom half of the match for an unbelievable 7-3 win (DWLDLWWWWW). Admittedly, it looked a lot closer than that most of the way, but I could easily have made it even more one-sided!

We're supposed to try and learn something new from each game, but I find it hard to say anything fresh about such a familiar conclusion. It's easy to tell yourself that 24... Nxd5 is junk (and I did) but proving it with the clock ticking is another matter. In the end all I discovered was that my technique isn't as good as Fischer's. Who knew? I am interested in my misappraisal of the 23. cxb4 variation though; I didn't grasp just how difficult Black's lack of space is for him. And there was some interesting shadow-boxing in the opening, even if both sides lost their way.

After this came the 4NCL Rapidplay, a two-day event (team on Saturday; individual on Sunday) at the ridiculous time control of 10 minutes + 10 seconds per move. I performed solidly but had some staggering misses; failing to convert K+B+4P vs. K+3P against Matthew Payne being the obvious lowlight. That's something I just can't go back to, at least not whilst there are other games to be getting on with, so let's skip ahead to another game for Wallington, in which I was finally forced to win a game.