A night off from the Najdorf

In the second round I got another titled player, FM Conor Murphy (221/2336), who strangely has started playing much more chess since becoming a student at Cambridge. Unlike in our first meeting I did not have the advantage of being in practice, although I did know more about him and could see some chances. I believed that he was more of an attacking player than his openings would suggest - or would allow him to be - so hearing that he'd tried 1. e4 recently wasn't good news. I stand by my opening choice, which worked up to a point, but there are some positions in which being very direct is a good thing. Once we slipped into one of them I was unable to resist for long:

I returned to my hotel feeling a little frustrated - not at having lost an interesting game to a clearly stronger player, but because I was sure I must have had something around move 17. It was a scrappy game in many places, but my intuition was right that there was a clear trend even if I exaggerated it. Up to move 20 Murphy didn't pay much attention to my ideas, and gave me more counterplay than I really deserved (15. b4, 18. f4 and indeed 20. f5 are all examples). But the white pieces gave him a headstart, so the price of this was only that I could have equalised. After that point I had to think in specifics rather than concepts and came out clearly second best.

My most glaring sin was that I didn't slow down when calculating, as Aagaard puts it - after 20... e6 21. fxe6 I recaptured with the f-pawn, not even noticing alternatives let alone analysing them. Therefore, my correct conclusion that 21... fxe6?? doesn't work caused me to wrongly think that 20... e6 was unplayable. Aside from that I missed the Nxe7+ fork, and my fallback assumption when I went into the whole mess - that I could always just sacrifice a piece on g4 and expose the enemy king - was badly mistaken even if it remained in the background. In the end though I went down because I followed the path of least resistance and defended passively, rather than looking for a creative way to break free. White didn't have to do anything special after that.

My third-round game would prove to be one of only two in the whole tournament against untitled opposition, as well as the moment when things really started to take off.