Preston day 1

Heres a novelty - actually writing my 'blog on the day of the event, rather than a month later. But less of a novelty was my result here at Preston - as so often, I mucked up the first round of a tournament, losing badly in 15 moves.

In fact, I'm in the midst of a bad run at the moment which I must turn around. I lost on Tuesday for the club at Huddersfield, blundering a piece on move 7. Then I lost in a game at the club on Wednesday, admittedly a friendly against a much stronger player, mated on move 13. And I lost in 15 last night. All three losses were due to lack of concentration and missing obvious moves by my opponent, and all three were in relatively unfamiliar openings. I'm going to punish myself, and entertain you, by publishing all of them on here.

I can't afford another grim run like last winters run of 10 defeats in 11 starts, so I have to turn it around. At least, thanks to the precepts, I'm not about to throw in the towel and just stop fighting.

Anyway, the story of last night's game is quickly told. I am staying at my colleague Chris's house in Preston where he lives with his wife & parents. I left work at 3.30 and drove over here, but didn't get here until 6pm owing to the rubbishy traffic on the M62. Chris drove me to the venue - a University building which is part of Central Lancashire University. Its a fairly unprepossessing venue - and let us not forget that I always seem to do badly in poor venues (Hull, Bradford, Huddersfield disasters come to mind) and better in nice ones (Scarborough, Hereford, Grange-over-Sands). I'm obviously very sensitive to environmental influences.

We only just made it on time owing to getting a bit lost, and I hurried to the chess hall only to find I wasn't in the draw. I asked the controller what was going on, only to discover I'd been put in the wrong section and was due to play a much stronger player. "Sod this" I thought to myself and said I would concede the game and just go to the pub with Chris. After some to-ing and fro-ing they re-paired my intended opponent and moved me to the right section, against someone else who's intended opponent hadn't showed.

We sat down to play - he tried the old Albin counter-gambit against me, which I've not played or studied since about 2005, but I remembered the theory well enough and soon was comfortably a pawn up with a protected passed pawn on e6 and threats on another of his pawns - happy days. He played what he *admitted* was a rubbish move, moving a Knight to h4 where it could be trapped if I could get g3 in, so I was soon going to be a piece up. He had one saving resource, a tactic involving forking my King and Queen , which would only work if I made a specific wrong move, which I obligingly did. Game over. I resigned. So gallling.

Went through the game with my happy opponent and he admitted he was losing . It also turned out that I'd seen loads more in the game than I had. Brendan O'Gorman wandered up and helped us go through it. Chris turned up back from his walk, rather surprised that my game was already over! We had a little session which involved the chap showing us his repertoire of opening traps most of which involved people playing unlikely moves.

Chris and I went off for a beer and a chess session in the pub , got a bit drunk and came back here and went to sleep.

Now I'm eating a superb omelette Chris has knocked up. He's a former professional rugby player and he says "you need to start the day properly- its all about preparation". Its certainly a nice omelette - cheese, onion, tomato.

Now I need to do like Russell Goodfellow does and "make someone pay" for what happened to me last night!