I'm in Torquay, for the 100th British Chess Championships, and my third attendance personally. I have rather a target to beat - last year I came 2nd= in the U160 and scored a healthy 2.5/5 in the U180, so personally, only a repeat or better performance will satisfy me even if last time I effectively had home advantage, it being held in North Shields which is just a stone's throw away from Carlisle.
Of course, I'll be posting games here with commentary almost each night unless I get some behemoth amount of prep to do, or a game is too complex to annotate within the day itself. I will rely on my own powers of calculation for posting games, but for looking them over, I will be using the engines I have - it'd be foolish not to since it provides such an easy way to monitor your failings or blind spots.
My hotel is wonderful - cool spacious room (certainly by last year's standards when I was literally in a room the size of a harsh prison cell, with no desk room or space to boot), wonderful location too and amazing proprietors who have already made me feel incredibly relaxed. In fact I arrived here by coach - a 10 hour journey. Lest you think this is difficult, firstly I have already once journeyed twice this distance and time (2000 miles, 18 hours overnight even!) to Chambéry in France where I played my first tournament holiday, despite having been to work the same night. Battling multiple haughty escalators and absent ascenseurs made it a hellish journey that year, though my time there was excellent, albeit I played rather horridly bad chess.
In fact there was a large rainstorm passing through Birmingham which finally ended the turbid heatwave I've been suffering under in Carlisle for the best part of a month. There is only so much Ridge Racer and Spyro The Dragon you can play in such conditions before you lose all remaining sanity. That said, many who have met me would argue that such conditions cannot possibly remove any sanity since I had none to begin with. To that I can only say, Purple Monkey Dishwasher!
I intend to go watch the Bulletteers tomorrow morning - IM Gary Lane and GM Keith Arkell playing an hour's worth of one minute chess - before losing my Grandmaster virginity in the simul. It will be particularly interesting to me to see how much of the bullet chess player's arsenal at 2500 is based on the fleeting subconscious fluency of hand moves, based on little calc except that done in the head, as opposed to the concrete conscious calculation that one might use say, in blitz. Then it'll be off to the laboratory to prepare for the U180 and PM Open, with a bit of arbiting at the Weekender in between that and the second week with U160 and PM Open. All in all I could be playing up to 8-9 hrs each day, but that doesn't bother me!
So stay tuned for lots of chess, and try to guess when the Torquay-related puns will come.
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