Sitting at the bored

Last month was the British Universities Team Championships. Bristol entered two teams; Bristol 1 had high hopes for finishing in the top area but I was playing for Bristol 2. Now, for some people the real draw of this event is the top class chess that can be found on the top boards. Others go because it's a good chance to catch up with chess players around their own age. For most though, this event is about hardcore late night drinking until the wee hours and agreeing draws on the Sunday morning.

Round 4 - Bath v Bristol 1

I'd had a tough Saturday facing a 182 from Imperial where I sacrificed first a pawn, followed by the exchange and finally my queen for a crushing loss. Then in round 2, a 194 from Bath Uni got revenge for my lucky win against their resident FM (oh, you hadn't heard?) by giving me a bunch of pawns whilst underhandedly going straight for my king. The only consolation was that round 3 was against the scratch team and despite spending the early part of the game at Sainsbury's (blame the rest of the team) I managed a comfortable win. 

After a hearty 3 hours of sleep, we stumbled to breakfast and then I moaned all the way through the AGM. As punishment, my fellow team mates nominated me to be BUCA Webmaster; a motion which got voted in quicker than I could object. If you didn't believe in the evils of drink before, let that be a lesson to you.

By round 4 I'd noticed that Bristol 2 should win an award for walking away from their games the most. True, it was showing in the fact that we didn't win a match, but still, it's probably worth something. Better yet, we didn't always appear to be concentrating on the game at hand when we were.

Even when everyone else had finished and I was down to 30 seconds, the most important thing was apparently to stifle the a yawn.

Pfft, I could draw this with a hangover and no sleep. Which is fortunate.

After that riveting draw and overall match loss, Bristol 2 were paired against the bottom seed Nottingham (although it was generally accepted that Southampton 2 were worse). Nottingham were in the same boat as us having only got points by default against the scratch team but my opponent seemed less than chuffed with his tournament score of 0/4 and resigned to the idea that he wasn't going to get much from this one. This game really took the biscuit with wandering around looking bored; I spent 25 minutes in my chair and at least 50 wandering around, fortunately, my c-pawn took care of it all for me.

In the end Bristol 1 finished 8th, God knows where Bristol 2 finished and I was quite chuffed under the circumstances with 2.5/5 and a performance of 155ish.

To finish, I'm obligated to put up my latest handiwork/link to the official site. If you're wondering what I did, well, I put up those links to the pgn files. (Edit: I also just added a highly self-promoting link to this blog and Jevon's.)

(Photos shamelessly stolen with much gratitude from JevonWhitby. I also highly recommend that you visit his blog on the BUCA Championship since it contains actual chess.)

(Edit 2: This game, for some reason, was featured in The Daily Telegraph. They didn't steal my annotations though. Can't understand why.)

If you don't get it, you weren't paying attention.