Old maladies

After an interlude of a few days, I was off to Burcombe in Somerset (via Bristol the day before) for a county match against Cornwall. Surrey wouldn't normally expect to play them, but we are stuck in the plate competition, the Minor Counties, which tellingly is far more popular than the Open. There was understandably little interest on our side, which combined with the average grade limit of 180 to put me on board 5. There I was up against Grant Healey, last graded 172 in January 2017.

A week after this match, one of my loyal readers shared his loss for the Surrey U-180 team, in which he got a crushing position early on when his opponent played insipidly, but let him wriggle out and finally went down in a lost queen ending. I was surprised by this, since I didn't remember showing him the score of my own effort which must have been the inspiration:

As well as constantly bungling positions so won that they cannot be bungled, it looks like I need to dig out my chessboard policeman persona too - I'm really going through my greatest hits at the moment. My friend was remarkably philosophical about his similar fate, but this is the sort of game I hate to lose most of all, when unabashed pragmatism wins out over actual understanding of the position. White was positionally lost by move 8, I missed clear wins on moves 14, 20 and 21 as well as a boatload of strong moves elsewhere, and yet...  As I said about the other game, you know that players like this will be as slippery as an eel, because they have to be.

What went wrong then? Firstly, I used up too much time trying to solve the position early on - 24 minutes on move 5 (!) and then 11 minutes on move 9 put me on the back foot straight away, which was especially dangerous against a fast player at an unusually speedy time control for a county match. As against Davey, this was partly the vicious circle of nerves: when you are low on confidence you struggle to make decisions, so you get into time trouble, which makes you even more nervous. I didn't fully understand the value of breaking in the centre with ...e5, and focussed too much on a kingside attack which was only ever a means to the end of diverting White's pieces. At the critical phase of the game around move 20 I wasn't incisive enough, somehow blanking out the ...f5-f4 attacking idea. My usual tactical ineptitude showed up again (14... e6?!) and I was put off by a draw offer which I should have protested. I also failed to show the requisite patience in the queen ending, although I'm not particularly interested in that part of the game since it should have been over long before. In other words, the things that have been plaguing all of my games for months.

After getting home from this miserable game just before midnight, I got up at 5am the next day to do some arbiting at a UK Chess Challenge Megafinal. It was a cruel weekend for me, but that's what you get for not being in work. My next chess was the CCF Lightning last Monday (ten seconds per move) which I won with an imposing 7½/8, although I was the top seed. Yesterday's bank holiday blitz wasn't so successful, with 4/7 including some annoying reverses, and then today I wrapped up the Wallington club championship.