Chipping Sodbury - Part 1

For those of you who read my bloggings about the Bristol Congress, you may recall that there is an arbiter in the Bristol area determined to thwart me.  In that congress, he combined the minor section with the intermediate.  This time, in light of there being no intermediate, he combined it with the major (Under 150 ECF).  This would substantially raise the bar for the minor chaps like me, but after a good 30 minutes complaining, I decided to go for it.  After all, I was riding on a wave of a good performance at Frome and I won the last Rapidplay minor event held here.  So how badly could it go?  Well, let's have a look at rounds 1-3:

Like round 1, I've tried to piece round 2 together from memory, but it was a much more closed game with some good positional play from my opponent.  Basically I can't remember after move 20.  In the end we both had about 2 minutes left on our clocks each and I was defending a losing position.  In time trouble I opened the position and we raced to each other's king but black landed a very solid attack, and most importantly, he landed it first:

Well, bugger.  As long as I got my only loss out of the way then I was still ok!  Round 3 I was set against another chap on 1 point:

So at the break before lunch, I was on 2 points out of 3.  There were some people above me, but I was remaining confident!  Anyway, there's 3 more rounds to go, so I think you'll have to wait until Part 2 to see how it turns out!