Changing the conversation

Round five gave me the white pieces against WIM Sue Maroroa (193/2104), whose biggest claim to fame is being married to Gawain Jones even though she is a strong player in her own right. She has a similarly aggressive style so this promised to be an exciting game and - at last! - a theoretical scrap.

On this occasion I was outprepared, and it showed; I failed to find a good plan and could ultimately do nothing to prevent Black's queenside play running me off the board. But, as in my earlier two losses, I could have put up so much more resistance if I had only tried to change the conversation before it was too late:

There has been a unifying theme to my losses so far: I have not defended bad positions well, and have too easily gone with the flow rather than making the effort to create hoops for my opponents to jump through. The clearest illustration of it in this game was 23. Qe2?! - I wanted to play 23. Qg4!, but didn't because of my usual disease of wanting too much certainty. I had to accept that the time for such things had passed, and that trying to hold the fort was bound to fail. As I said in round three, technique here is so good that advantages will always be converted if the game remains normal. With 25. f4? I finally accepted this, but that move was as desperate as it looks.

Most of the time this shortcoming was shielded by my preparation - bluntly put, I didn't get many bad positions. No-one can rely on that all the time though, and 16... Nb6!? was definitely a blow. The frustration of being outsmarted probably contributed to my reply, which with hindsight has little to recommend it. I wondered if I'd been outnumbered when preparing, but amusingly when I said I'd been trying to use Jones' games as a clue (he has switched to 1... e5 recently, after all) she told me that half of his repertoire is junk and she tries to avoid it! I suspect she may have been joking, but I truly hope not.

Although this is the way I would prefer to lose if I had to - in the way I would aspire to win - I still found myself feeling much lower than 24 hours earlier, for it was a massacre at the end of the day and I was outplayed in every department. My mood did not improve when I discovered that, unbelievably, I had been paired with an IM again for round six. I was lucky enough to have some very supportive friends though, and at this time of need one of them told me in no uncertain terms to stop whinging and go and beat the guy.

So I did.