South Wales International 2022, Round 2

Round 2 was also reasonably comfortable for the seeded players, with only Jukes's draw against Nilsson preventing them from getting a clean sweep in the 1/1 scoregroup. Midway through the round, though, this didn't look exactly assured: both Bullen-Camacho Collados and Arkell-Menadue could plausibly have gone the other way.

My pairing was against an 18-year-old Welshman called Ifan Rathbone-Jones, who played everyone's favourite traditional drawing weapon, the London System. I went for an aggressive counter involving ...Qb6 and ...Bf5, and ended up with a nice position that I managed to convert quickly.





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