Life in the Chess Olympiad
Hi everybody. Today we played against team Malaysia. Chan Kwai Keong, our reserve board, sat out this round, so we fielded boards 1-4, as did Malaysia. I was paired against FM Peter Long. Looking at my Megabase it appears he has played 2 games with white in 2008, and before that he played games in the 1990s. So he appears to not have been very active for the past few years. Looking at his games, we saw that he usually opened with d4, and then he played some sort of nf3 then bg5 line, sort of like a Trompowsky but without the possibility of f3. So after preparing an interesting line for this, we set off for the playing hall. I was feeling quite confident. No way my opening preparation would fail twice, right...
So I guess you could say that that was a premature resignation. My position was horrible anyways, it is much better to resign here than in a drawn game. So having resigned, I walked around for a while to try to get the loss out of my system. After about 15 minutes, I returned to watch the remainded of the Hong Kong team finish their games. Edwin Borigas lost his game against IM Mok after being slightly better after the opening, which was a Classical French. Bryan Lee played very well and achieved a superior position against his opponent, however, he was under time pressure and so agreed to a draw. The three of us had to wait for team captain and board 1 Hon Ki Tsang to finish his game against IM Mas, which was a drawn out endgame where Mas accurately converted his extra pawn. So having lost badly, I was rather shocked. I feel that my game against Long could have been a draw, and before taking the rook and e3 white probably had a slight advantage. However I overlooked the simple tactic. Still very dissapointed by my game I asked my captain if I could sit out the next match. So I will not play against the US Virgin Islands tommorow. I will however, try to help my teammates as much as possible with their preparation. Hopefully they will win!!!
Cheers Everybody
BKJ123