A quick catch up on our first two matches. First of all, we lost out to Telepost A at our first fixture of the season. Things might have been so different! However, our 4-1 defeat has been erased from the memory banks and I am therefore unable to provide any more details!
Second up, we were due to be playing Oswestry away. This time, we achieved the same 4-1 score, only in our favour. To be fair, Oswestry were missing their normal top two players, so started at a bit of a disadvantage. The first player to finish was David Everington, who was playing David Bennion. Ever the optimist, I assumed initially that David had won quickly. Alas, the opposite was the case; David had lost using his favourite 3…f5 line as Black against the King’s Gambit. David has sportingly annotated the game, which you can see here. I know to my cost that David has used this defence very effectively many times in the past and he confirmed after the game that this was actually his first loss with the system. Anyway, things hadn’t started quite as intended.
Next to finish, was Mark Smith, who was playing Ashley Peile. Here is Mark’s outline of what happened:
“Ashley played Alekhine’s defence which, as you know, has been my main e4 defence over the last couple of years. The game followed a pretty typical pattern for a White win in the Alekhine’s: White got a space advantage, Black had one chance to justify his position tactically, which he missed and he had to give up a pawn to stay in the game. The resulting position looked very good for me, my Bishop looked a better piece than his Knight, Black had some pawn weaknesses and my Queen looked good on d4. Fritz puts position right on borderline between clear advantage and winning, but it was going to be a long time before my extra pawn counted. I was expecting a long battle when Ashley made a dreadful mistake which cost him his Knight. He resigned at once.”
So we were level. The other games seemed fairly balanced, including mine against Graham Ives. I had a slight space advantage but Graham had established a Knight on b4 and seemed to be putting up solid resistance. Next to finish was Daniel Lockett on board 4, who was playing Keith Grice. Daniel takes up the tale:
“To summarise my game against Keith Grice, it was probably a bit of an escape really. A kind of Benko declined which I got a reasonable opening position out of but then made a couple of poor choices and got myself hemmed in and under pressure on the King’s side. I tried to solve this by pushing my h-pawn (bit desperate, but heh!). I’d initially intended h6 to drive off his knight but played it to h5! Luckily for me, he chose to release all the pressure by a series of minor piece swaps which left me with the open file and Keith with an isolated d-pawn which I eventually picked off. Then I had the more active rook and night and a couple of passed central pawns to push. As i say, I felt a bit lucky to have got out of that one with a win!”
Shortly afterwards, Jamie Hopkins converted on top board against C Higgie, so we had won the match. That just left yours truly to finish. Although we had won the match by this stage, I wanted to press for the win, as by this stage, things had simplified to a Rook and Pawn ending and I had a protected passed central Pawn. As the clocks ran down, things simplified to a Pawn race. We both queened but I achieved the first check which, as is the usual rule in these cases, meant that I had a winning position and, indeed, delivered mate in a few more moves. A tense finish, as we both had less than a minute left on the clock.
A good win, then, which keeps us in the running for a good performance.
Francis Best, A Team Captain