Nottingham report part 2

I cant find the first report I wrote from the Nottingham tournament, which I think was about the preparation for the event. If anyone still has a copy, could you send it and I will post it here.
This was my report on the first day of the tournament -

Saturday April 25

I'm sitting in a pub near the chess venue which is full of MOrriss dancers. The food menu wasnt available because they haveto cook lunch for the dancers, so Im just having a cheese sandwich. The dancers are dancing and the Indian premier league cricket is on the telly. Im sitting with Russell Goodfellow's friend Nigel Holroyd who is eating soup and complaining about how much the soup cost. In more annoyance, Im having to write this on Notepad because the stupid Word programmeIm trying to use wont let me open a new document.

I told Nigel about my Sister running in the London Marathon and he told me he once ran a Marathon in 3hr 45 in Scarborough.

Not the best of starts to the year of chess progress, since I lost this morning. It was quite a good game at least and I managed to apply most of my precepts.

Yesterday was quite a good day. I got up early and went out for a walk in the woods at 05h30, part of my health and fitness campaign. THen I did some chess practice, and then went to Temple Newsam park in Leeds for another walk for an hour or so. I had lunch with some work colleagues in our normal Friday lunch pub - nice Thai curry - and then went round to Julian BOdger's place. He's building a workshop in the back garden and I've been helping him dig the foundations. Good honest manual toil. Now the concrete has been delivered and he and I had to shift six massive railway sleepers down tothe building site - they were enormously heavy and it was a huge effort involving ropes and rollers - we used the same principal as they did when they built Stone Henge!

Nigel is telling me about what he looks for in women - good in bed, keep quiet when you tell them to, cook your dinner and and keep the house clean!

After I'd had a pint of cider with Bodger, gone home and had a shower to get all the bits of bark out of my hair andtalked to Michelle, I set off for Nottingham. I was staying overnight at John Peach's place. We had a take-away and drankgin and watched a Bond DVD. I managed not to get drunk or stay up too late, thus keeping to one of the chess precepts.

Got up this morning at 7am, feeling abit ropey mostly because of the curry. I walked across the Nottingham Universitycampus, which brough back some nostalgic memories, got a bus into town, and then walked up Mansfield Rd to the chessvenue which is at Nottingham Boys' High School. Not a bad venue but as ever it was hard to find the way in - there was building going on and the place seems to be a bit of a maze. I did get there on time, another precept achieved.As usual there was an unseemly melee around the draw to see who was playing who.

It's very hard to write this against the distraction of Nigel talking, cricket commentary and Morris dancers.

My game was against an ungraded bloke. He told me afterwards this was his first year of serious chess having taken it upwhen he retired. Hes been studying 2 hours a day and played in about half a dozen tournaments with reasonable result sowas always goign to be a tough opponent.
The game went OK but I always felt slightly behind. I was Black and was always on the back-foot.

Not much to tell you about the game; it contained few elements of interest. He played 1 d4 and the Torre attack; I was always struggling to keep in it.

The bottom boards of the minor were in a small overflow room. It was a school classroom and the walls were coveredin posters about grammar and punctuation - how to use commas and full stops and the difference between adverbs andadjectives. I was quite impressed - I didn't think that schools taught children that kind of stuff these days.

Still feeling a bit dodgy, I went out looking for a cup of tea - couldn't find a refreshment stand so ended up walkingdown the hill to find a costa coffee place. Got a green tea and some sparkling water but it cost me 20 minutes on the clock.

I tried to get some initiative on the Queen side but my pieces were all slightly out of place and tripping over oneanother. I had to concede the open c-file in the end and despite being material level at the time control (36 moves)I was not looking good. By this stage it was K+N+B+R v K+N+N+R and 5 pawns each.

Shortly after the time control I blundered a knight away. Considered resigning but keeping to the precepts, I played onuntil move 50 when I dropped another pawn and resigned.

Not a bad game. This pub is very noisy. THere's a little park near the venue and also a cemetary behind. I think I will go for a nice walk for half an hour.

If I lose again I will withdraw so I can go down to London to watch Eleanor in the Marathon.

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I've just put my game into Fritz. We both played pretty well and often found Fritz' best moves. Noone really blundered
Fritz' assessment was that the game was level all the way up until my blunder - noone was more than 0.25 of a pawn aheadfor the whole first 37 moves. Maybe the time control distracted me a bit - I had had to motor a bit to make it afterlosing 20 minutes. I had to make 20 moves in 30 minutes which isn't much by Goodfellow's standards but it was a bit of a rush for me.

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