{"id":1235,"date":"2016-02-08T09:56:56","date_gmt":"2016-02-08T09:56:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/?p=1235"},"modified":"2016-02-08T14:17:32","modified_gmt":"2016-02-08T14:17:32","slug":"kidlington-chess-congress-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/?p=1235","title":{"rendered":"Kidlington Chess Congress 2016"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The annual gathering of chess aficionados in Kidlington was rather more traumatic than on previous years, due largely to my own poor play.  It is also the first time I&#8217;ve ever seriously considered dropping out of such a tournament before the end.  On balance, I&#8217;m glad that I didn&#8217;t do so, but the fact that it was on my mind probably didn&#8217;t help my play especially during the first game on Sunday.  It&#8217;s also the first time I considered not doing a full blog write-up of the tournament, but instead just doing a one-liner consisting of a single, terse profanity.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Round One: playing <strong>Black<\/strong> against the highest-rated player in the section (whose brother happens to be a grandmaster!) was tough.  That said, I played very solidly and managed to survive long enough to make a decent effort.  I miscalculated a lengthy tactical sequence which led to him having two bishops against a rook in the endgame, which was a formality for him to win.  Shame to have <strong>Lost<\/strong> the first game, but I wasn&#8217;t too unhappy about my play here and my opponent was very complimentary.  He went on to win the tournament, so no need to feel too ashamed about losing.<\/li>\n<li>Round Two: my opponent arrived 20 minutes late for this game (<em>&#8220;Terribly sorry, I was watching Man City in the pub&#8230;&#8221;<\/em>) but then proceeded to bash out the first 11 moves almost instantly.  I was playing <strong>White<\/strong> against similarly-rated opposition and got a reasonably decent position out of the opening.  I couldn&#8217;t find any way to break through and spent far too much time looking for a win in what was really an equal position.  An outright blunder in time trouble meant that I <strong>Lost<\/strong> this one too.  I&#8217;d never lost two consecutive games at this tournament before, so I was rather disappointed.  Much worse was to come, however&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>Round Three: the Saturday evening game drew me as <strong>Black<\/strong> against Darrell Watson, who I&#8217;ve played here twice before (also both as Black) and I&#8217;ve beaten him both times.  I felt confident I could make amends and get my first points on the board.  I gave up bishop for knight early on and then aimed to close the position to take advantage of the material imbalance: this worked very well and by move 30 I broke through, winning a pawn giving me connected passed pawns.  Tragically, I immediately missed a simple tactic and lost queen for two minor pieces and it was effectively <strong>Lost<\/strong> from that moment.  I was so angry with myself and I&#8217;m sure my opponent heard what I muttered under my breath at that instant!  I played on for a short while, just giving my opponent a chance to go wrong, but it wasn&#8217;t to be.  Finishing the first day without any points and having just misplayed so horribly was very difficult.  Before heading home I stayed at the venue for a while mulling over whether to just give up and withdraw from the tournament.  With a score of zero out of 3, there was a very real chance that if there were an odd number of players left in the tournament for Round Four I&#8217;d be without a game anyway.  My thought processes were rather muddled, but I was evaluating &#8220;You&#8217;ve got 0 out of 3, you might get 2 out of 5.&#8221; against &#8220;You&#8217;ve got 0 out of 3, you might get 0 out of 5&#8221; and so on.  I decided not to withdraw and headed home for some sleep, although I didn&#8217;t sleep very well.<\/li>\n<li>Round Four: as the player with the lowest score in the tournament, I was pleased to see that I was not given a bye for this round and actually had an opponent.  I played <strong>White<\/strong> against a chap who had lost his first two games too, but had taken a half-point bye for Round Three.  I misplayed the opening (Hyper-accelerated Dragon) and got a very passive and poor position almost immediately.  So there I was, 20 minutes after the game started, with 0 out of 3 and facing another lost position.  My thoughts returned to withdrawing from the tournament, writing up the &#8220;one-line profanity&#8221; version of this blog post and so on.  The game just didn&#8217;t seem to run in my favour and, despite thinking for a long time on several moves, I couldn&#8217;t find any way to get activity.  I felt very demoralised at this moment.  Eventually I couldn&#8217;t avoid losing a pawn.  My opponent had strong central pawns, one of them a passed pawn, in a double bishop endgame.  A stroke of luck in my favour was my opponent missing the strongest move and, although I was still losing, it gave me a glimmer of hope.  I helped provoke a miscalculation on his part and he lost his extra pawn.  The game looked drawn, but I only had three minutes (plus 15 second increment) on the clock.  He played a move, then offered a draw: I had the suspicion he&#8217;d just noticed he&#8217;d made a mistake.  This was indeed the case and the game simplified into a winning King and pawn endgame for me.  It was a great relief to <strong>Win<\/strong> this game, after having spent around three hours believing I was lost.  Points on the board at last!<\/li>\n<li>Round Five: the last game was against slightly lower-rated opposition and as <strong>Black<\/strong> I played an open version of the Caro-Kann Defence which I&#8217;d not tried before, but proved quite successful.  He played a little inaccurately and I got the opportunity to play a spectacular exchange sacrifice, although once he&#8217;d recovered from the quite visible shock, he was able to come out of the situation just down one pawn by returning the material.  Convinced I had a winning position, I thought for possibly rather too long looking for the key moves.  He offered a <strong>Draw<\/strong> after I&#8217;d repeated the position once and I accepted.  It turned out there was a way to make progress, but it would have been very difficult: even with two extra pawns in an opposite-colour bishop endgame would not have been a certain win.  I was partly relieved to have avoided defeat, to be honest and having played both Sunday games without a loss was psychologically very positive.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My final score of 1.5 out of 5 was of course not very impressive and my grade will drop for next year as a result: I&#8217;ve decided that even if it drops low enough to make me eligible for the Under-145 section, I&#8217;ll still play my &#8216;usual&#8217; Under-180 section anyway.  Better next year?  Let&#8217;s hope so!<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: Games and analysis available <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/chess\/kid2016.html\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The annual gathering of chess aficionados in Kidlington was rather more traumatic than on previous years, due largely to my own poor play. It is also the first time I&#8217;ve ever seriously considered dropping out of such a tournament before the end. On balance, I&#8217;m glad that I didn&#8217;t do so, but the fact that&#8230;&nbsp;(<a href=\"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/?p=1235\">read more<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1235"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1275,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1235\/revisions\/1275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}