Outside of Theory

After yesterday's tussle in a mainline, today my opponent lead me far off the beaten paths. GM Sebastien Mazé of France is a nice guy with a fun chess style: he plays all kinds of different stuff! I could tell from playing through a few of his games yesterday that this was another player who seldom, if ever, studied opening theory. And as expected, we had a very fresh game:

In the post-mortem, both Sebastien and Sam were telling me that h6 is a major mistake. I would never have thought of that, because I thought white had spent time playing h3, I could afford to play h6 to preserve my bishop if I wanted. But my opponent created one problem for me after another. I noticed that during the first 8 moves or so, Sebastien spent a lot more time than I. I was thinking about the position as well of course, including on his time, but I did not look at as many concrete ideas as he did, thinking of things in a bit more of an "idea" way. And that was perhaps part of how he managed to outplay me in that phase.

Tomorrow is the rest day for everyone here except Carlsen and Bologan, and those fanatical enough to play a blitz tournament on their rest day. To me that seems like it would defeat the purpose, so I'm planning to walk around the town, and perhaps jump into the Lake.

Then at midnight (in Switzerland), it'll be time for Death-Match 7!! Exciting!