Cotswold Open 2026 Report
If you are expecting another tale of me ending up triumphant like Coventry in February, I’m going to temper your expectations. This one went significantly worse. The Cotswold Open was held at The King’s School Gloucester, a beautiful location that was thankfully easy to get to via train so no hotel for me this time.
There were only three sections to this tournament, so instead of the Open, Major, Inter, Minor selection I had in Coventry, where I played in the under 1750 Inter as top seed, this time it went Open, Major, Minor and I was in the under 1860 (I don’t know why it was such a strange number: I suspect a typo from 1850) Major and I was seed 10 out of 53. To set the scene, we were undergoing very hot weather and it was swelteringly hot all three days, with the second game of each day coinciding with the sun lining up with the windows. The organisers put in various measures to try to curb the heat, but we were really feeling it.
The games were 90 minutes + 30 seconds per move, so games on the longer end would last about 4 hours, which is about an hour longer than I am used to. I think I need to reflect on this and figure out how to plan deeper, because I was only sub 20 minutes in two of my games and I didn’t have a great record. When I looked at the games played in the Open section the players would frequently be running on increment in the midgame and they are better players than myself. I think there is more long term thinking I could be doing in my thinking time once I’ve weighed up my couple of lines.
I was glad that I’d left extra time to get to the venue, because it took me ages to find the school. I’d found one of the other buildings of King’s School, rather than the main campus, then spent half an hour circling the Cathedral asking people for directions. One woman was wearing a t-shirt with an 8x8 checkerboard and was looking a bit lost. It turns out she was nothing to do with chess and was looking for the choir. That felt like a weird coincidence.
In the first game the top half of the section played the bottom half, so I went in as the higher rated player with White against Paul. Paul was from Ireland and was in Gloucester visiting his girlfriend. He was very pleasant to speak with and I get the impression that he was involved in the organisation of the tournament in some way. He’d at least helped set up the boards and tables the night before. You can find our game, along with my other five games here.
Paul played the Slav Defence with an early 7…Ne4 which was unusual. It led to an early swapping off of a Queen, a Bishop and a Knight each by move 10. I suspect he was trying to simplify early and attempt to get an easy draw against me because I was rated 150 points above him. With a lot of the heavy hitters off the board I was content to start charging through my pawns on the King’s Side and though computer analysis afterwards shows me that I missed a tactic, I was never unconfutable and eventually I managed to break through the frontier with my rooks. There were a few points were Paul had a choice to attack (e.g. by doubling up his rooks on move 29) or defend and he always chose defend. In effect this gave me as much time as I wanted tempo wise because I was never racing him. I could keep trying breaks until one of them worked, which of course eventually one did.
With a win in the bag I headed out into the sunshine, sat at one of the picnic benches in direct sunlight and ended up speaking with people. Almost everyone I met was willing to chat chess and it became apparent that half the players were from the local Gloucester Club, but they were all very welcoming. I saw a few familiar faces, Colin Vernon from Warndon Chess Club and Joe Friar from Kidderminster, both of whom I played with as a junior twenty years ago. Colin had played in the Minor category for the last three years and was giving the Major a shot, while Joe, super star that he is, was playing in the Open. I also recognised some players from either league games (e.g. some of the Malvern players) or from Coventry (e.g. those doing the FIDE circuit).
Game 2 (use the same link as before) was against Stephen from Wales. He has games on record going back before I was born and though his rating has been higher than mine at times, it was currently in the trough rather than a peak. This was the game where I felt the most out played. There was no moment where I felt like a made a major mistake (move 23 I took back with the wrong pawn, but I was already losing), but every move my position seemed to get a little bit worse. That’s the sign you are playing someone who is just better than you, where they win via the attrition of tiny cumulative positional mistakes that are eventually enough to lose. We played a closed Sicilian with 1. e4 c5 2. Nc3 Nc6 (I play d6 against 2. Nf3, but against 2. NC3 I angle more for a Dragon where they can’t play the Maróczy Bind because they have already blocked in their C Pawn) 3. Bb5. The computer likes the response 3…Nd4 where the Knight is hard to displace and I will try this next time, but I went 3…e6 and after a swap off I ended up with lots of pawns in the centre which proved my comeuppance. I was never able to develop any of my pieces, stuck behind my own pawn lines and eventually I was left shuffling my pieces around on the back rank, unable to make any progress. In talks with Joe Friar afterwards, he suggested taking back the bishop with the D pawn rather than the B pawn, accepting the loss of a central pawn in exchange for having an avenue to attack through.
That was the end of day one and in chatting with one of the Malvern players I realised that train strikes the next day meant I wasn’t going to get in in time for the first game the next day. Some players took Byes for game three, but Joe kindly offered lift to Colin and myself for the Sunday morning which I am thankful for. With a win and a loss after day one I was feeling fairly happy, but exhausted from such long games. I came home, starting trying to write this and came to the conclusion that this would have to be a past tense, post tournament report instead, because I could barely focus.
On day two everyone had ditched the shirts and suits in favour of t-shirts and shorts. It was due to be hotter than the previous day. Game 3 was against Daveen, who was also on one win, one loss. He was a confident player and we both rattled out our pet lines in the King’s Indian Defence (me as White). Some of my best wins against good players have come out of the KID, where I can usually weather the storm of the King’s Side push, with themes of using the Queen and Light Squared bishop to protect the d1-h5 diagonal, and win space by pushing on the Queen’s Side with the sneaky b3 a3 b4 maneuver that Joe Rastall taught me at the Worcester Congress last year (the b3 prevents a response of a4 from Black).
However this game quickly became an open nightmare, where after 30. BxRg7 I was up material but with my King exposed. On move 31 I thought about playing it safe, losing my bishop and defending my King with Qf3 (I didn’t see the computer recommended 31. Bd4), but instead I spent a long time thinking through lots of lines 10 moves deep where I was going to have to accept getting checked a lot of moves in a row, but with enough material to win if I could survive. The computer didn’t agree with my conclusion of 31. Qb2, leaving my King to get attacked, but keeping the bishop on the board, but I stand by it.
After moving my King around the board, eventually I was in a winning position. However I messed it up on move 42 where I should stopped a check with my bishop (a move that me and an American woman Sara (more on her later) analysed at lunch time just after the game and found to be winning, long before I put it into the computer. After that, my fate was sealed and I actually lost to a checkmate, which doesn’t happen very often. I feel quite a lot of frustration about this game. I felt I managed to snatch a loss from the jaws of victory.
At lunch, feeling a little red from the sun the day before I opted to sit under the shade of a tree on the grass, The person I sat next to was Sara was from Cowley (Oxford) and we spoke about the various Oxford Chess Clubs and about Oxford in general. I’ve got a Gaudy coming up soon at my old college and the conversation made me feel nostalgic. We looked through my game on my little travel board.
Despite being beaten by two opponents in a row who were rated in 1600s I was confident I could readdress my score line in game 4. This was not to be the case. My opponent Tom, decked out in full Gloucester F.C. kit, including, it appeared, boots ready for the pitch, was a eager young chap in his 20s. I had Black in an Alapin Sicilian. I’m not the most experienced in this opening, but I know the general themes and I’ve found that there is always some extra tactical resource you can spring as Black in every situation. I thought it was going well, but then after 7. Qb3 I started to regret my decisions. Now, analysis after the game says my sixth move wasn’t actually an issue, because there are some sharp tactical lines that save me, but in future I’m going to play 6…e6 instead of getting the bishop out, to avoid this position completely. Just look at how depressing my position is after my eighth move. I have almost everything on the starting ranks, save for a single pawn a single space up. By my 12th move I’m even worse and I’ve lost castling rights!
What followed was two hours and twenty moves of me slowly trying to unwrap my pieces and better my appalling start. I think I did a bang up job of this and I managed to get equality, before messing everything up under some time pressure on my final blundering move. I’d played passively in both this and game two (both Sicilians, I need to up my anti-Sicilian game, because anything other than the Najdorf then I don’t know any of the lines deeply) and I was aware that I’d made backwards knight moves in every game so far, which I knew I would have to defend to Scott Oxtoby at a later date.
So, by the end of day two I was on one win out of four against entirely lower rated opponents. I was already feeling chessed out by this point and knew I had another day of this. Chess is definitely more fun when you are winning. However it was nice to talk chess, have a lager and analyse our games on the train home with one of the Malvern players who happened to be getting the same train.
Day three was the bank holiday and was somehow even hotter. On the train I met a lovely family who were on their way to Bristol and to be honest it was nice to feel like a good chess player again when speaking to non-chess players. To them I was a person reading a chess book on the way to tournament, therefore probably better at chess than everyone they knew, while I knew that I had underperformed. Sometimes you just need perspective.
“Yeah, you are the number one speller in this car, or that car, or... wait, don't look at that car.” - Homer to Lisa after her bad Spelling Bee
Ok, enough with the self indulgency. I needed to win both the games on the final day to reach at least 3/6, so that was my aim: save face with an even score. This would mean having to win with both White and Black. Game 5 was against Sara, the American who I had happened to spend lunch with the day before. She was friendly and I felt I little bad for using the fact that she had mentioned casually the day before, that she plays very slowly, against her.
Our game was a Dutch (me as white) and I was never under much of a threat. It was a game where I just kept upping the complication and pressure, knowing that whoever resolved the pressure was going to do so at disadvantage. It was a who blinks first loses sort of game and I’ve got a lot of patience. There is a temptation to trade off out of complication because there is a mental load every turn if everything can take everything else, but it is often the person who initiates that comes off worse. In the midgame Sara would frequently spend 10-15 minutes on a move, while I had an hour left on the clock. Eventually time pressure got to her, we swapped off and she blundered. Once again she was very friendly and I wish her all the best teaching the juniors in Cowley.
I had more time for lunch than I had done on the previous days, so I wandered around Gloucester on a bit of an explore. There was a charming Beatrix Potter Museum based on the Tailor of Gloucester and I got enjoyably lost in my travels, which is how I like to experience new places. I knew I could always head to the cathedral tower to get back to the tournament. I also had a Guinness 0% for the first time and was surprised that I felt a little drunk afterwards which was an interesting psychosomatic effect. It was great, I don’t think I could tell the difference between that and a real Guinness.
Back to the tournament and I had Black against David. He played 1. b4, which strikes me as a bit of a maverick move. All of the best lines against it come from playing 1…e5 and playing a kings pawn game, but as someone who hasn’t played 1.e4 in twenty years, I wasn’t going to let him transition into something like that. Instead I played 1…b6 planning a c5 push and then just developed normally. Similar to game 5, I didn’t rush into a big attack, opting instead to keep layering up threats and ramping up the complication. There was a chess quote that I’d read in Endgame Strategy (book by Shereshevsky) that very morning from Tigran Petrosian “Admit it, you didn’t know that ‘two weaknesses’, which are completely defensible in themselves, are alternately under fire, and the attacker relies mainly on his territorial superiority - for the better lines of communication. The game is lost, because at some point it turns out to be impossible for the defender to keep up with the enemy in the speed of regrouping of forces.” This quote was from the chapter The Principle of Two Weaknesses and has about endgames, but during the game I was thinking about it in the context of the middlegame. I had threats to make a break which could all be defended individually, but I could reroute my attackers to different targets faster than David could move his defenders. Eventually he saw he could no longer defend everything and it has him that broke the tension first with 22. c4?
After this his position game crumbling down. There was still danger for me and the computer shows that I missed a tactic on move 40 which would have won him the game, but thankfully he missed it too. I thought that I could respond to 41. Rc7 with 41…f5,but whatever. Bad calculation ended up not costing me.
So I’d done it, a redeeming day 3 and overall I’m on 3/6. I ended up very far done the score board because of the early losses I was playing people who performed worse on average and so the tie-break puts me at the bottom of those on 3/6. Results here. I’m glad I played it, it was not a good performance for me, but that’s ok. I’ve also got slightly closer to getting an official FIDE rating, because you need to play five games against people with official FIDE ratings. Only my first opponent had one, which was a win for me, so now on paper I had 2.5/3 for official FIDE games, which is a bit of a lucky break. I may come back next year, but I would like to recruit more Worcester players if I do. I know of three Worcester players who missed the sign up, so if you are considering playing next May, sign up early.
