A dose of my own medicine

It’s been a while since I’ve written a chess post. Occasionally I feel a tiny bit guilty about this, as my articles are cross-posted to ChessVibes, where the poor chess readers have to put up with my maniacal prose on all manner of chess-free frivolities.  But the guilt is fleeting, and after all, none of the new and exciting things happening in my life at the moment have anything to do with the 64 squares.

But last weekend I managed a sneaky trip to England for the Four Nations Chess League, the only chess I seem to manage to fit in these days.  I was looking forward to sitting down at the board again, but I picked up a bug in Amsterdam before I left and as any chess player will tell you, there’s nothing worse than having to play chess when you’re sick. The closest thing I can compare it to is sitting an exam when you’ve got a cold: it’s about the same level of enjoyment and headache-inducing effort.

What to do? After visiting the ATP Rotterdam Masters a fortnight ago, I took a leaf out of the tennis player’s handbook. Injured tennis players often decide to serve-and-volley in a match to shorten the points. I decided to play sharp, risky opening gambits to avoid rawn-out maneuvering battles and send the games swiftly towards their results. Besides, every time I played a long game at these British league matches, I invariably ended up missing the team dinner. And I was hungry.

I was paired on the Saturday with the black pieces against the solid Fide Master, Laurence Webb.  Perfect: I could whip out my new strategy and also avoid his preparation by playing one of my favourite old gambits, the Portuguese. In fact, I’m writing a book on the opening at the moment, so a swashbuckling victory would make a delicious modern addition to my material.

…More than a little naive, in hindsight. Having not played the variation we got in about a decade, I forgot my own analysis and found myself a piece down as early as move 7.  Despite my best efforts to trick Laurence with cheeky traps and cunning complications, he found all the right moves, and any sniff of compensation for my ‘sacrifice’ was quickly snuffed out. My position went from bad to worse, with the computer evaluating Laurence’s advantage at over +9 for seven consecutive moves, even rising as high as +16.  (For the non-chess among you, +9 means white’s advantage is about the equivalent of having an extra 9 pawns to your opponent. A top level draw rarely swings above a one-pawn edge for either player, and anything above 1.5 is considered a winning advantage.)

To be fair, none of the ways to finish me off were trivial to calculate, and I managed to pose enough practical difficulties that Laurence joined me in time trouble and ended up giving back most of his advantage. In the end, he accidentally repeated moves three times, allowing me to claim a draw, though even this was not without controversy (see the notes to the game below).  Not my finest game, that’s for sure, but at least it was (a) entertaining and (b) short. Actually, usually I’m on the other side of these sorts of games, building up a winning position only to choke in time trouble. After so many occasions feeling robbed, I’ve learned more than enough about how to set your opponent difficulties in converting an advantage, and so in my defense, it was probably about time I picked up half a point on the other side.

The team was successful overall despite my draw, although I think my captain was less than impressed with my efforts, and strongly hinted that my future membership would not at all be helped with a repeat performance on the Sunday. Not an unjust assessment, to be fair! Fortunately, I played significantly better the next day, building up a sizeable attack early on against the Kiwi FM Nick Croad and crashing through in a brief and less controversial affair. So it looks like my spot in the team is safe for another month…

Below is the lucky Saturday swindle. As you click through the moves, those in italics will have a couple of comments appearing below them. The game is hardly going to instill fear into the hearts of my future opponents, but it’s quite entertaining. Having said that, it’s safe to say I’m not going to put it in my new book…

When we reached the final position, I put my king on d6, stopped the clocks and claimed a draw by threefold repetition.  Unexpectedly, this proved to be quite controversial! The position has indeed occurred three times, but of course, neither of us was recording moves at this point so I couldn’t prove it on the scoresheet. In fact, strangely, the arbiter asked me to play on! I reminded him that I’d stopped the clocks and made a draw claim, so we went to reconstruct the last couple of moves, and after a bit more debate, we finally agreed on the draw.
Naturally, I was extremely fortunate to get the half point, even though one could argue that this was the best position I’d had all game. But after …Kd6, white keeps a winning endgame advantage with 42.Kh3!, keeping both extra pawns. I have a few drawing chances, particularly based around heading for a Rook-and-Bishop-versus-Rook or a Bishop-and-Wrong-Rook-Pawn endgame (both of which are theoretically drawn), but it would be a lot more work, and surely I would have missed dinner…