League Games - Spring 2018
Hi all,
Time to move on to my games in the Lancaster and Morecambe District League from early 2018. As you'll see, I was in pretty patchy form throughout this period, and the results aren't too impressive - but they're not too bad either, if I'm honest. Worse is yet to come! (See the end).
We'll start, however with a pretty bad loss against Phil Seery, top board for the Bare Village club. We won this match overall 3-1, since Bare's bottom boards are normally in the 60-70 ECF range. Nevertheless, I could have done with a win following Shropshire's disappointment!
I don't spare my embarrassment by just showing my wins on this blog. That's for sure! Between this and the game where I blundered a piece on move 6 or so (back a few years) I have a negative record, +1 -2 =1 against Seery, he is just solid with White, and 3 of those 4 encounters I did have Black. However, I think from this game, I learnt to be more aware of when I'm not putting in the effort at the board.
From an opponent that I have a negative record against, to one I have a great score against - I think I have a +4 -0 =0 longplay score against Barry Hymer of Lancaster. It's not that I feel comfortable when playing Barry, he's an enterprising player! It's possible that works in my favour - I enjoy playing him, the positions are interesting - and maybe I do put more effort in when playing him as a result.
It felt good to get a decent win under the belt - always helps with the confidence.
The final game I have to show is against an FM, Glenn House. It was the only time I managed to face Glenn during my time in Lancaster, as he didn't play too often in the Lancaster league, probably due to the lack of much opposition. The game started out sharply, but fizzled - I won a pawn, but it was never enough for a real advantage, and in the end not too much happened.
It's not too bad to be on the better side of a draw vs. an FM. However, I needed to be making more of an attempt to win games like this when I have White, and by this point Glenn is not THAT much higher rated than me. It brings home that there's work to do if I want to achieve my chess goals!
I'll be back soon with the next episode - BUCA 2018, which (as it turned out) would be an extremely tough event for me ... but just how badly did I fare? You'll have to wait and find out!
Thanks for reading!
