A matter of timing

For the second season in a row, I went into the last 4NCL weekend of the season with my team needing to get a good result to survive in Division 2. But this time I was playing for, not against, the team which could bring in John Emms and Chris Ward for the occasion, and we had enough depth that I was probably placed too high on board 7. So it should have been easy, right? Well, no. We made it, but it wasn't much less nerve-wracking than Downend's adventures last year even if the balance of probabilities was always on our side.

First up were Sussex Martlets, a team of twenty-somethings all graded around the 190s. That depth sounds impressive, but the fact they were in the relegation pool suggests you need a bit more at this level. Anyway, the match card read 242-197, 235-199, 208-199, 195-205, 190-189, 181-189, 183-206, 181-192 - look beyond the two GMs and you see that we were struggling a little towards the tail, nowhere more than on my board where my luckless run of pairings continued, black against Matthew Payne (206/2099). Matthew is a strong player but only has a forward gear, which should have been his undoing when we played last year. If you're wondering why it never appeared on the blog, suffice to say that it wasn't. This time he got a position that was more his thing, and whilst I stood well objectively I couldn't cope with the task before me:

There was a creeping inevitability about our 3½-4½ loss (WWDDLLLD) - we were doing well on most of the boards at some stage, but it wasn't to be. The only upside was that with so many losses by the odd point, we would win any tiebreak.

If the point of analysing your games is to learn from your mistakes then I'm apparently not doing a very good job, for I lost in the way that I so often do - a lack of attention to detail at key moments. The game boils down to my failure to play the undermining ...f6 break at the right moment, and then also to cope with the difficulties created by playing it at the wrong time. Tactical mistakes had their say - 22... Qg7? was asking for trouble, and I should have foreseen 24. Qf7+ - but I was also very gloomy; allowing White exf6 and then Bd4 seemed like death, but Black is able to play around the weakened dark squares. In sum, I underestimated the potential of my own position and could only see my opponent's possibilities, just as I did in the recent game against Dominic Gibbs.

On the day, I decided to put it all down to bad luck with the board order yet again. Much of our team went into Telford for dinner, which turned into a saga of its own. Apparently the team went to a very good pub last year to watch a boxing match, and Ward was obsessed with finding it since there was again a highly-trailed fight on. After we got a taxi to the wrong place, he spent the next hour or so trawling through Telford pub listings on his phone, but all in vain. Finally Emms got fed up with this, decided to look for himself and took about 30 seconds to track it down. After a second taxi we arrived just in time for the boxing, which I guess was alright if you enjoy watching grown men knock lumps out of each other to satisfy the baser urges of the crowd. Soon though it was time to turn to more abstract violence over the chessboard, and a must-win match against our main rivals in the pool.