London May Open

Today was the London May Open, which like the London March and April Opens, is a single day 4 round G/60 event. Today was a bit different though, there was a larger tournament being held a few towns over which attracted a lot of the regulars away, so this tournament was smaller than usual. In the previous events there were 2 sections, Open and U1700. In both of those events I took shared first in the U1700. Today because of the smaller crowd the format was changed into a single section tournament, which means I got to play against some stronger competition.

In round 1 I was paired up with a young kid playing in his first long-play tournament. I checked the CFC website afterwards and saw that he had only played in rapid events. I was black, and he tried to draw by playing the exchange french, but after some mistakes and a nifty tactic I was able to win a knight and easily take the point.

In round 2 I was paired against the #1 seed in the tournament, a guy rated just shy of 2100. I had white and embarassed myself by losing a piece to a simple tactic on the 18th move. I resigned shortly after.

In round 3 I found myself playing another guy just shy of 2100! It seems that the person I was supposed to play had to leave for some reason, so the TD stepped in and took his spot. I settled in for another loss but found myself hanging on after he played a line in the benko I knew quite well. After a long struggle with winning chances for both sides the game came to a draw. I was quite happy to draw against a guy rated 500 points higher than me! During analysis later we found that I could have played on in the final position and won...but meh, I was too tired by the end to care about winning.

Since my round 3 game went so long I found myself having to play round 4 just a few minutes later. I played a guy who is rated exactly the same as me. We got into a middlegame where I definitely had an advantage but all I wanted to do was simplify into a quick draw, I had no energy left. Luckily he was in the same boat as me and we called it a draw on the 28th move after about 10 minutes. We had a nice chuckle afterwards about how tired we both were and I went to analyze my round three game.

So all in all I am quite happy with my result. Excluding round 2 I think I played quite well, and I had a 1768 performance overall, which makes my third 1700+ performance in a row. Yay me! 

Here is my game from the third round for your enjoyment.