Floored

My next fixture had been a casualty of the snow a few weeks earlier: top board for Wallington in the semi-final of Surrey's main knockout competition, the Alexander Cup, against Kingston. Whilst the two teams in the other semi-final were much stronger, Kingston still considerably outgraded us: 183-207, 169-182, 162-172, 149-163, 145-159, 138-156, 139-152, 125-153, 114-142, 121-140. We've beaten them plenty of times before in recent years with such odds though!

I had my eighth (and, mercifully, final) consecutive game with black, against 207-graded Michael Healey. He likes to aim for weird positions where he can apply his tactical skills - 1. b4 is a prominent part of his repertoire - but of course when you play like that things are bound to go spectacularly wrong once in a while. Whilst I'm getting demoralised by the unrelenting strength of my opposition, you can always hope when facing such one-dimensional players; indeed I played Healey almost five years ago and was unlucky not to get something even then. In the end though, this game was much more one-sided and I went down almost without a fight; despite the innocuous opening I could virtually have resigned by move 18:

One positive I suppose is that I didn't melt in time trouble here - I got it out of the way well before then. Rushing early on got me 10 minutes ahead on the clock at one stage, but my play was superficial and this approach doesn't seem to work for me; I lack the necessary attention to detail. I was also much too negative, scared to allow any tactical shots but nevertheless floored by them, first 16. e5! and finally 33. Rxf7+!. Whilst Healey's play wasn't perfect (13. Ng5 still looks clumsy, and the computer is somewhat more incisive towards the end) he was much too strong for me this time, largely because I failed to generate any counterplay.

Wallington lost 3½-6½ (LWDWWLLLLL) but not without a fight - we put up a tough fight on all of the lower boards, but it wasn't to be in the end. This match was just a bonus really, and we've also achieved our only real ambition of survival in the second division of the league.

Naturally I was still feeling miserable though, so my next chess was at CCF's Easter Rapidplay. I needed to win some games, and actually played very well in the early rounds, but I ran out of steam and collapsed to 2½/7 with some shambolic play in the last few rounds. So of course I then decided to enter the Blitz too! This went much better, and whilst my 5/7 came from very kind pairings, it could have been better if I hadn't flagged in a won position against Nasir Rizvi. (Thankfully I got my revenge a few days later, but more on that next time.) I want to catch up on my slowplay games though, so let's jump ahead to another Wallington game, and at last into April, this time in the penultimate round of the club championship.