Pride and pragmatism

In round 4 I was surprisingly downfloated to an FM, and IM-elect, Joseph McPhillips (235/2402).* A nasty surprise, but then I wouldn't have entered if I didn't want some challenging games. You clearly don't get to such a level without being pretty good, but you have to come to the game with a plan and mine was to play the man rather than the ball. He had lost a rather speculative game the day before, and with the title in his pocket I had to hope he just wasn't interested in this one.

Then again, a throwaway line in the ECF obituary of Peter Clarke (the top British player in the 1960s who wasn't called Penrose) has always stuck with me. It said, in so many words, that he never achieved all that he should have done because results were less important to him than being taken seriously. And the same could probably be said for me. I didn't fear losing this game, but I did fear being made a fool of. McPhillips has been happy to play all sorts of oddities lately, and what if he went for another unsound hack which actually worked? After all, how hard could beating a 175 who can't calculate be? So I was actually hoping this would be a normal game of chess, even though I knew that my best chances lay with precisely the opposite!

The opening was anything but normal, and yet step by step we found our way towards something like a chess game. I daresay he had to take me more seriously by the end than he had at the start, but I got outplayed in a double-edged endgame and it was not to be:

To put my philosophical musings a different way, it remains my view that playing things like 1. b4 e5 2. a3 d5 3. d4 demeans the IM title, but that's probably a (small) part of why I'm nowhere near having to worry about it. The implied belief that he can beat me with any old rubbish is unpleasant, but really he is just trying to take me away from my biggest advantage - it's pragmatism, and differs only in degree from how I prepared for Krzyzanowski the day before.

Anyway, let's talk about the game itself. Steering the game back towards a familiar structure was a good choice, allowing me to understand what was going on, but I took this too far with 9... c5?!. The logic behind it is stupid - 'I think the position is balanced, but this is the move and it leads to an unpleasant position, so I must stand worse'. Following the path of least resistance without fighting to find something better is also what made me seal my doom on move 32, just as the game was starting to get interesting. That was a pity, since I'd fought back hard in the middlegame and showed, just as against Murphy, that despite seeing a lot less than these guys I can put pieces on good squares just as well as they can. However, playing 31... d4, or failing that 32... Rf7, required calculation. I also failed to appreciate just how vital it was to activate my king; those variations, along with the ones on moves 36 and 44, show that it was possible to put up more of a fight even if the position remained lost.

I got another titled opponent for the middle round, albeit 'only' a WIM this time. McPhillips had tried very hard to avoid a fight on my territory, but my next opponent took the bull by the horns.





* Speaking with my arbiter hat on briefly, the default FIDE pairing algorithm always tries to float from the bottom of a scoregroup to the top of the next one down, so I was lucky it only happened once. Personally I think that the British (CAA) algorithm deals with this better, floating down from the middle of the scoregroup instead. Anyway, it was a little annoying since McPhillips was rated higher than anyone on 1½/3!