Rusty Fill-in Plays Game

One of our Main Line Chess Club (Gladwyne, PA) members, Dr. Robert Cameron, an emergency room physician, came in late tonight and missed the pairings for our tournament. So as a courtesy I asked Rob if he wanted to analyze or play a non-rated game with me instead, and he gladly accepted the game offer.

Except for "think out loud" games I play against intermediate computers for some of my students' lessons, this was the first game I had played in quite a while, over 3 months.

I asked Rob what time limit he wanted to play and he suggested one hour each. I inquired whether he minded playing with an old analog clock since it was handy, or get a digital one so we could play with time delay. He said the handy old one was fine, so the time limit became 60 0. Then I asked if he wanted to practice one color or another and he said he wanted to take Black. My final question was whether he wanted me to play a particular first move or opening to practice, and he said no - my choice.

My play was not sharp, but I did manage to hold the advantage throughout (Light notes embedded in the game):

It's sometimes difficult to judge your own play but, after looking at Houdini's analysis, I would rate it as not too bad, but rusty (as you might expect). It was stored as game number 742 in my ChessBase "Dan's Slow Games" database. This database doesn't have all my slow games, nor all my rated games (I have played only ~350 USCF-rated games!), but I think it has almost all the more important ones, and ones against strong opposition.

BTW, someone suggested I only publish my winning games (as you might suspect, most strong players publish primarily their better games, for obvious reasons! ). In my upcoming book "The World's Most Instructive Amateur Game Book", due out from Mongoose Press in December 2012, I threw in two of my games (out of 30 total). One was an excrutiating loss and the other a very costly draw. You can read an excerpt from the book at http://mongoosepress.com/downloads/instructive-amateur-game-book.pdf.

Someone else asked whether the title was a little presumptuous. There are only a small handful of amateur-amateur game books so it's easy for each to claim some superlative(s) like "best", "most instructive", "most in-depth", "first", "best-analysis", etc. without much competition. I did not wish to claim "best" but it seemed "most instructive" was a reasonable claim. Hopefully you will agree! .