Nerves again

Good evening from a drab hotel room in Northampton, where I am rounding off my coverage of the second 4NCL weekend partway through playing in the third. In blogging as in chess, I seem to get into time trouble more and more often these days.

After KJCA's humbling on Saturday, we faced North East England, who seem to be clearly the strongest team in our pool. Factor in our missing players and we looked set for a drubbing: 205-213, 180-208, 182-206, 183-205, 158-195, 181-197, 179-197, 143-169. Having dabbled in some board order antics, I found myself rotated up to board 2, which meant playing an FM - although since this was my tenth encounter with a titled player this season it's not as much of an event as it used to be. The FM in question, Tim Wall (208/2236) is also someone I've drawn with before. The earlier game suggested to me that any preparation was unlikely to help, but also that he might not take too many chances in pushing for a win. I was right on the first count, but destined to be ground down from the better side of a queenless middlegame littered with lost opportunities:

The real tragedy is that we could well have squeezed a result out of the match, but had to settle for a 3-5 loss in the end (LLDWLWLD). The day before it had been hard to tell from the result that we had in fact put up a fight. The pool remains very competitive though, and we're certainly holding our own no matter what the results say.

Clearly I should never have lost this game. Even when I ducked a theoretical challenge - and it's telling that I took a different approach against Wall than I did against someone around my strength in an earlier 4NCL game - I still got a better position, and the sort of quiet game with a mild initiative in which I excel. At times I was threatening to outplay him, but I made a few moves which look jittery and a bit too direct - 23. Nxc8?!, 26. Nb5?! and 34. b6? combined to sink me in the end. The endgame is especially frustrating, because you can tell that White knows he needs to play actively, and most of the important ideas of the rook ending appear on the board - I just didn't manage to implement them accurately.

Not an ideal start to the campaign then, but playing two 200+ opponents was never going to be easy. My next game was in the Wallington club championship: a meeting with the second seed, and played in the shadow of our previous game...