After my dumb loss in round 1 I was being extra careful the on Saturday in rounds 2 and 3.
In round 2 I was white against William Zhang. I was playing a little passively but got a bit ahead before my opponent my an error on move 22 I I won the exchange ( I won a rook for a bishop ) and then a few moves later lost a Knight. After that it was just a case of cleaning up.
Round 3 was against a Monish Santhosh who is a young guy ( 7 I think ) playing in his first tournament ( he had a bye in one round for a point which is why he got matched with me ). Easy win although I did look at a position for a whole two minutes before I noticed my Queen was en prise.
Round 4 and 5 were on the Sunday.
First up I had white against Stefan Kolev. Stephan was on a provision 1200 rating but is probably a little above that. I was a little disappointed with this game, I lost a pawn early on and gradually got a worse position by making inaccurate moves. Eventually my opponent had a passed pawn on a2 which completely tied me up and allowed him to capture a bunch of my King side pawns until he had a won endgame and I resigned.
Round 5 was against George Trundle and was short but fairly interesting. White played a sort of Stonewall Attack although he didn’t really get a chance to develop it correctly. He brought out his queen a little early and I ended up winning a Knight when the queens were swapped off. I was then in quite a cramped position while he pushed up some pawns and made a queenside attack. However after he made an error and allowed me to swap off some of his attacking pieces he decided that his attack had run out of steam and resigned.
So after 5 rounds I was now 3 wins and 2 losses out of 5 games. Unfortuneately all my games had been against players rated lower than my current rating ( let alone what I hoped to be on) so it didn’t look like I was going to lose ratings from the tournament.
