Chance

"Oh, Lord, where did the feeling go?
Oh, Lord, I never felt so low..."

Big Country, Chance

Yesterday morning my three-week exile came to an end, as my flat finally gained internet access. That time has been pretty productive (it's amazing how much it changes your daily routine) to the point that I don't have any games to annotate: I just need to publish three of them!

The first of the trio took me to Cheam and its quintessential blustery church hall, which can only mean a match for Surrey. (Or a county association AGM, but those aren't quite so bloggable.) This was for the Open team, in much better shape than last year having scored a win and a draw against Kent and Middlesex in the first two matches. Now we were hosting Essex, and winning this one too would put us in an excellent position to take back the SCCU Championship. When I first got asked to play I was in no hurry to reply, but got chased on the same day as my loss to Ian Snape, which spurred me to agree. It's true that waiting out bad form can be the only option, but I didn't think I was helping matters by being so part-time about it all. A week later and I duly appeared in Cheam, black on board 14 against 170-graded Larry Marden - some happy memories there. This game was not destined to be filed in the same place.

After the game, Dan Rosen told me that he would offer some words of comfort, but having done exactly the same thing in the previous match he knew there was nothing anyone could say. He was right of course; chess has taken me to dark places before, but this was the first time I seriously asked myself if it was time to move on with my life. It had been so long since I played well and truly felt I deserved to win that losing hours of work in mere minutes - and knowing it was going to happen before it did - was just unbearable.

Theoretically speaking this game was nothing new, although I could have saved myself some anxiety (and time!) by remembering annotations I wrote as recently as August. The most interesting thing was the dynamic between the queen and rooks. At first sight, the transaction looks good for White: my most dangerous attacker is removed, my king is rickety and he seems free to push the kingside pawns towards their destiny. But one lady in the field is not an army, and the rooks are far stronger when allowed to coordinate. The final stages have far less to do with this game than the ones that preceded it.

If this post had been written closer to the time I'm sure it would have been a lot more heartfelt, but maybe the most valuable life skill chess teaches is how to pick yourself up and move on from even the most crushing disappointment. Thankfully (or not) for the reader, I've invested too much in chess for a couple of months' bad form to actually make me quit. My next stop was a blitz tournament in London, which came at a good time. My play was spotty but 3+2, even more than a flat G/5, is so random that I was bound to win sooner or later, and actually took down a couple of decent players. (True, in my first four blacks I had three London Systems and one Stonewall, but beggars can't be choosers.) From there it was soon back to the 4NCL, and KJCA's unlikely charge for the promotion pool.