{"id":509,"date":"2010-02-08T21:52:39","date_gmt":"2010-02-08T20:52:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/?p=509"},"modified":"2010-02-09T10:11:47","modified_gmt":"2010-02-09T09:11:47","slug":"kidlington-chess-congress-2010-better-than-last-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/?p=509","title":{"rendered":"Kidlington Chess Congress 2010: &#8220;Better than last year&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The First Weekend In February is when chess fanatics from all over England gather for the Kidlington Chess Congress.  Unlike last year I had had much more practice and felt more confident of doing well this time.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/?p=367\">Last year<\/a> I played four games: I drew three and lost one.  Not great, but OK for not having played competitively for so long.<\/p>\n<p>This year I was playing in the Under-145 tournament: my last posted grade in the 1990&#8217;s was 139 and my performance last year was equivalent to about 130, so this seems reasonable.  In fact, this year all of my opponents had grades in the 130s.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/kid2010.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/kid2010-300x157.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"Kidlington Chess Congress 2010\" width=\"300\" height=\"157\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-513\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/kid2010-300x157.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/kid2010.jpg 463w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Round One: As <strong>Black<\/strong> I managed to get a mediocre position out of the opening.  I was definitely a little worse when my opponent made a mistake which meant he had to give up his Queen for a Rook and Bishop.  This was good for me but, ultimately, the placing of the remaining pawns and accurate defence by my opponent meant that the game ended in a <strong>Draw<\/strong>.  Score 0.5 out of 1.<\/li>\n<li>Round Two: As last year, I took this round (Saturday afternoon) as a pre-arranged bye, to avoid spending the entire weekend away from the family.  So that was worth another half point; score 1.0 out of 2.<\/li>\n<li>Round Three: For the Saturday evening game, I played <strong>White<\/strong> against an elderly chap who made his moves incredibly quickly.  He only used about 15 minutes for the entire game.  I hoped that his rapid play would be his downfall, so I played carefully and looked for moves with deeper consequences than I thought he would see.  Eventually he made a seemingly &#8216;natural&#8217; reply which was in fact a blunder: I won a knight outright and from then it was only a matter of time before I <strong>Won<\/strong>.  Of course I was absolutely delighted with this, given my failure to win a single game last year.  As an extra bonus, his quick play meant that the game didn&#8217;t end too late, so I could get a good night&#8217;s sleep prior to the Sunday games.  Score now 2.0 out of 3<\/li>\n<li>Round Four: Playing <strong>Black<\/strong>, I opened with the Caro-Kann defence, which I&#8217;ve never played before competitively.  Without making any obvious errors I got into a position where my opponent had a huge amount of play and plenty of attacking options; I didn&#8217;t really have much choice other than to defend as carefully as possible.  When his attack fizzled out, my opponent made a misjudged sacrifice of rook for bishop, hoping for compensation to continue his attack; this didn&#8217;t work and from then on, I was on the offensive.  It was a long game, more than three hours, but I eventually managed a second <strong>Win<\/strong>.  Score now 3.0 out of 4.<\/li>\n<li>Round Five: In the final round, I played the Morra Gambit as <strong>White<\/strong>, which I haven&#8217;t done before: he played the <em>3. &#8230; d3<\/em> line which is essentially the Morra Gambit Declined, which meant that I had a reasonable position out of the opening without having sacrificed a pawn.  My opponent castled riskily into a Queen&#8217;s side attack and the game finished rather quickly, although I made a mistake right at the end which, fortunately, he missed.  That was my third <strong>Win<\/strong> in a row and left me with a very respectable score of 4.0 out of 5.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My final round game finished fairly early, so I stuck around watching the other games play out: at some point it dawned on me that, depending on how these other games finished, there was a possibility I&#8217;d be in the first few places and be eligible for a prize.  At one stage, there was a chance that I&#8217;d be part of a massive share of 2nd Place, but in the end I came equal 4th: the winner of the competition had 5\/5 and two others had 4.5.  There were three of us on 4\/5, sharing the \u00c2\u00a340 prize, which the organisers very generously rounded-up to \u00c2\u00a314 each \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>Overall this was a very good tournament for me: I scored 3.5 out of 4 over the board and remained unbeaten.  My calculations show that my grade for this tournament was around 170, with which I&#8217;m very happy.  I still haven&#8217;t played enough games in the last two years to get back on the &#8216;official&#8217; English Chess Federation grading list, but maybe if I play again next year&#8230; ?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The First Weekend In February is when chess fanatics from all over England gather for the Kidlington Chess Congress. Unlike last year I had had much more practice and felt more confident of doing well this time. Last year I played four games: I drew three and lost one. Not great, but OK for not&#8230;&nbsp;(<a href=\"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/?p=509\">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-509","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\/509","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=509"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":518,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/509\/revisions\/518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sungate.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}