My Third Game of the 2013/14 Season - a Draw on Board 1 :)

Today I played my very first game on board 1 for 'Didcot 2' and had the black pieces, faced a stronger opponent graded 137 ECF (1746 FIDE equ.) whilst I'm still only 122 ECF (1626) officially, he managed to gain an early initiative but his attack vanished, I became a pawn up and defended ruthlessly without giving my opponent any endgame winning chances. He accepted my draw offer after LOTS of moves where we both tried probing for weaknesses but neither of us could make progress.

I can say now I should have played better, this wasn't one of my better games at all... but I was/am feeling quite ill as there's some nasty bug going round my town a lot of people are ill at the moment. Playing the game down to the last few minutes on our clocks drained my energy loads, here's what happened...

As you can see he had no way to make progress unless maybe he thought about an exchange sac but as he was already a pawn down I don't think it crossed his mind. I was low on energy and couldn't find a way to make progress so I just held the position as long as I could without creating further weaknesses.

More importantly, as a team we won the match 4-2 (!!)  A nice way for the second team to kick off the season!