Lone Wolf 1/11 - Untuned Antenna

I’ve entered Lone Wolf Season #21. This series of posts is going to track my progress. The time control is 30 minutes + 30 seconds per player.

ROUND: 1

JB (1982) vs HowHorseyMoves (2127)

Result: draw, 33 moves

OPENING

I haven’t spent much time looking at my White repertoire of late, so I decided to play it safe. I like this set up with Nf3 and c4 together with a quick e3 and b3, holding the d-pawn back. Ray Keene was rather fond of it around the time that he was trying to become England’s first ever grandmaster 45 years ago or so.

Here if Black plays … c5 White has the option of cxd5 transforming the game into an isolated pawn or hanging pawns position. Whether that’s objectively to White’s advantage or not is besides the point. You get an unbalanced interesting position with something to play against. Perfect.

If, as my opponent did, Black tries  4 … Be7 instead you still get chances for a gentle little nimble. Nothing much, but typically it’s more comfortable for White and very pleasant to play.

Whatever the rights or wrongs of this strategy, at the point I played 16 Rfd1 

things had gone exactly as I’d hoped.

MIDDLEGAME

Here I missed a - to be honest - not too difficult tactical chance.

Reflecting after the game I realised that I’d been drifting in concentration over the previous couple of moves. Zoning out a bit whilst my opponent was thinking. I’m sure that was partly responsible.

Specifically, I failed to noticed that Black’s king was at the end of my bishop’s diagonal. At the critical moment my chess tactics antenna was untuned.

ENDGAME

At the time of missing my tactical chance I calculated a short 4 move sequence that led here. I’d thought it must be advantageous to me because of my active rook on the 7th. Well, that turned out to be completely wrong. 

Without the bishops, sure, Black would find it really difficult to hold this ending. With bishops on, though, I have nothing. There’s zero pressure on the b-pawn, for example, because the bishop on c5 simply defends it.

CONCLUSION

A disappointing ending to the game. My opponent was much higher rated than me, but if - as I like to think - my playing strength has increased over the past few months, I should be looking to get results in such games.

On the positive side with just one more good move I would have had good chances to win and could very possibly have left the game feeling very satisfied.

So there’s work to be done but the game was in no way a disaster.