Overcoming 500 Points (And A Spider)

Few would countenance the idea that Kenilworth might be the underdogs in an U8750 Cup match. After all, we have won the competition in each of the last three years, with four titles in the past five. There have been some brilliant nights, and great performances. Yet nothing lasts forever... Some of our younger heroes have now either gone over the rating cap, headed to university, or both. Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, we've seen several retirements from competitive play amongst our more senior squad members. In addition, a number of potential players weren't available last night, so we had to go for something of a new look team. 

Weighing in at 8200, I'm willing to bet this was the lowest graded quintet Kenilworth has fielded in this event in a very long time. In contrast Shirley were a whisker below the cap at 8714, outpointing us by 514 points. We were outgraded on every board, by respectively 56, 116, 109, 116 and 118 points.  Yet what we lacked in rating points, we more than made up for in commitment and effort. All of which made last night's 3.5 - 1.5 victory a match that will live in the memory for as long as our cup final wins!

The evening got off to a lively start. I gave Steph a lift and unfortunately a spider made an appearance on the car's internal mirror, when we were driving down the motorway. Steph isn't a great fan of spiders... I promised to catch it on arrival, but unfortunately it eluded me. I guess the encounter sharpened our senses if nothing else, and fortunately we proved more adept at grappling with our human opponents.

As ever, nothing happens at Shirley early, and after we did all get in, there was a mild panic in Shirley's ranks. They were both lacking a captain and seemed to have one player too many... Fortunately, it transpired that they'd forgotten it was an LDCL match and I wasn't playing for them (which I do in the BDCL), so problem solved...

When proceedings got underway I was up against Keith Ingram on Board one. I've played lots of wild, exciting games with Keith over the years, but this wasn't one of them. Keith played a slightly unorthodox opening and stood slightly better after the first hour. I eventually managed to neutralise his king side pressure and we agreed a draw in a position where it felt like he had a slight, but not obvious edge. 

Patrick finished at about the same time. I didn't see anything of his game, but he clearly made light of the rating difference between him and Jon Asbury on Board 5, comfortably holding the draw. A great effort on Patrick's part. So 1-1.

The other three games were all terrific and at this point it seemed to me that we stood better in all of them. Dan had a position that didn't look great at first glance on Board 2 against Darren Whitmore. However, he was up a pawn and it wasn't obvious that Darren had an obvious way to break through. I was hopeful Dan would be able to unravel his pieces, at which point he would stand better. On Board 3 Tony, making his debut for the club was up a passed queenside pawn, in his game against Robert Purcell. With rooks, knights and bishops still on the board I thought it was about 50 -50, as to whether Robert would successfully blockade or if Tony would break through. On Board 4, Steph also had the better of Fred Dickson, mainly because all her pawns were on a different colour square to her bishop and all of his were on the same colour as his cleric. I just wasn't sure that she had enough to win, but it was worth a shot!

All three games went to the wire. Dan was the first to finish. He had been playing off very little time, but as his position improved, Darren slowed. Suddenly Darren's forces looked over-extended, with vulnerabilities to various pins and checks that were difficult to deal with. In desperation Darren forced the queens off, but this just made things worse and Dan was a full piece up. Darren tried a few final tricks but Dan held his nerve to bring home the full point against a very strong opponent. An excellent achievement!

Steph eventually concluded that Fred was as elusive as the spider. However much she tried, she couldn't trap him. I suspect the win wasn't there, but she'd absolutely given 110% and the draw was another extremely valuable half point for us.

All of which left Tony as the last game to finish. Tony had played in a couple of the Kenilworth summer quickplay events, but this was his first ever slow play game. It was fantastic to watch. He worked the queenside pawn for a long time, with a lot of skill, and I'd inwardly inched up my expectation that he would win to about 75%, even though it was still a very tricky position. Rob then managed to dig in extremely well, and ultimately managed to swap the queenside pawn for one of his kingside pawns. The position morphed to rook, bishop and two (Rob) vs rook, knight and three (Tony). With all the pawns now on the same side of the board, it looked much more harder for Tony, but he showed incredible fight!

As the clocks ticked down to vapours Tony was absolutely relentless. He kept setting problems that Rob had to solve in not much time. As ever in chess, if you can keep asking questions, there is always a chance that eventually your opponent will get one of the answers wrong, and that's what happened... After hours on the rack, Rob finally succumbed and Tony brought home a fantastic debut victory! The first of many, I am sure.

So 3.5 - 1.5, with one spider still unaccounted for. 

I've had various messages from people today (both inside and outside the club) congratulating the team on a triumph that seemed unlikely. We'll go on to the next round (after Christmas) with a lot of hope. Who knows, maybe this team will also be looked back on in time, as having been as formidable as its predecessors... It's certainly a great start!

A Win at Home for the C team

Last Monday was our first home game of the season, against Leamington C. With a good number of C Team players to choose from this season, we were able to field three players making their first league appearances of the campaign: Algirdas, Patrick, and Anish. To round things off, Steph returned after her win the previous week.

On paper, our team was 300 rating points below the Leamington side, but home advantage must have worked in our favour, as we secured a 2.5-1.5 victory, with wins for Patrick and Anish. I was not able to watch the games, but I am sure they were all excellent chess matches.

Congratulations, everyone, and hopefully we can repeat the feat when we take on Shirley next Monday.

Quick Fire Double

Admittedly not as quick as this, which even became a quick fire treble:-

But even so, a second win in 9 days for the B team over Solihull A was still pretty fast work. After a 2.5-1.5 home triumph last week, the team managed a 3-1 win in the away return match on Wednesday night. Both teams had been missing a couple of players for the first encounter (when the total grades were 7609 for us and 7376 for Solihull) but were beefed up for the return, with Solihull at 8129 and us virtually the same at 8114. A tight match could have been expected, with a draw the most likely outcome as all the individual match ups were pretty close, too.

Quite unusually, I was the first to finish with a 23 move win over Andrew McCumiskey on Board 2 - with Black! After a fairly mundane opening I was very slightly better when Andrew made a terrible blunder and lost a whole rook to a bishop sacrifice. Not a brilliancy on my part, but I'll take it!

It was even stranger that this was the first game to finish because the other three boards had all descended into instant chaos right from the off, in contrast to my turgid game. And in fact it took a long time for the second game to finish, when Bruce scored an excellent win against Don Mason on top board. Don eventually lost on time, but by that point Bruce was two exchanges to the good and about to win more material. I had thought that Don was outplaying Bruce on the queenside, especially when securing the d3 square for his pieces, but Bruce just went all in on the kingside and something must have gone badly wrong for Black - though, of course, I failed to see the decisive moments!

On Board 4 Rhys then agreed a draw with Ray Carpenter to clinch the match. The pawn formation had got blocked and there were no possible breaks for either side in the double rook ending. This was a quiet ending to a very exciting and challenging game where I couldn't ever decide whether Rhys was much better or much worse. (Well, chess is a difficult game!) Earlier I had noticed the return of a much loved KCC positional motif when Rhys acquired a fianchettoed knight on g7 - I hope Joshua, who was sitting next to him, appreciated this as much as I did. (For those of you who are bemused by these references, I would point you to this ancient article - even though, most regtrettably, the accompanying game no longer appears, due to technical reasons which are far too complicated for me.)

Which brings us to the man himself, on Board 3. I doubt there has ever been another KCC match where I have finished first and he has finished last. He wheeled out an interesting pawn sac in the opening which caused some difficulties for the Black king and piece development, but Akshat Shivakumar very carefully unravelled his pieces and despite further tactical interludes the game eventually came down to a ridiculously difficult minor piece ending, but with Joshua still a pawn down. However, that didn't tell half the story. Joshua had bishop against knight and each side had two connected passed pawns - Joshua a and b, Akshat e and f. It looked grim for Josh, though, as the Black king was very strong and the White pawns were unable to advance. However, despite going down to about 3 seconds on his clock, Josh's defence was inspired and he managed to hold the position by sacrificing his two passed pawns to distract the Black knight and then eliminate all bar one of the Black pawns, so that he could sacrifice his bishop for the draw. By the way, I don;t know what the rule is about this, but the clock they were playing with had the sound turned on, so that it beeped loudly when Joshua's time went under 10 seconds and then again - even louder at 5 seconds! Whether he would have noticed he was about to lose on time without the audio interruption I don't know, but I suspect that the sound really should not be switched on to give players what amounts to outside assistance.

Music time. Autumn's here, so this seems quite appropriate.

First Home Win

 It is that time of year when the nights are drawing in, and we are having to drive to matches in the gathering darkness. While there is yet to be a nip of frost in the air, Kenilworth v Solihull matches always generate a good competitive atmosphere to enjoy.

Both teams were a little depleted for yesterday's encounter. Solihull A were without Don Mason and Aksath Sivakumar. Equally, we were missing Mark and Bruce, and it looked set to be a tight contest. As it turned out, it was never a match that we looked in danger of losing, but whether we were going to win or draw went to the wire.

Rhys opened Kenilworth B's account with a fine win on Board 3 against Tony Sadler. While I was sitting next to Rhys, I must confess I didn't see much of the action. However, Tony didn't look particularly happy throughout the proceedings, and at certain points sighed a sigh that all chess players will empathise with. I wasn't surprised when he resigned.

I was next to finish on Board 4 against Matthew Allen. This was the game where we had the biggest ratings advantage, but Matthew is a very solid player, and my recent "exploits" for the C team (see Dan's recent post) meant that I was quite apprehensive. According to Fritz, the position was dead level in the middle game, with Matthew pushing on the Queenside and threatening to open the centre, while I was looking to consolidate. I eventually managed to find a tactic that won the exchange, but Matthew still had a lot of play. I negotiated his threats quite well, but at the expense of my clock, and found myself with three minutes to his thirty. However, the beauty of having played in the ECF 3/2 Blitz qualifier at the weekend was that this still felt like a lot. I held my nerve. Matthew made an illegal move and resigned, but I had a forced mate by this point. So 2-0.

Joshua's game against Andrew McCumiskey on Board 1 was another I didn't see much of, but Andrew seemed to force an unstoppable pawn through to the seventh rank moments after my game had finished, leaving Joshua with no choice but to resign. Having been destroyed twice by Andrew last season, Joshua had at least put up a much better fight than I'd managed in my games with him.

So it was all on Mike to get us over the line, against Ray Carpenter on Board 2. Mike was up by a piece to two pawns, with a lot of heavy wood (but no queens) still on the board, in a massively unclear position. They were both below 5 minutes by this point and when Mike offered a draw, Ray agonised before accepting the offer. 

So a 2.5 - 1.5 win for us, which could prove to be very valuable as the season unfolds.

We've got the return leg at Solihull next week. Hopefully there still won't be any frost, and it's not like the nights will have drawn in much further between then and now. Still, you never know... Doing the double over Solihull A would certainly count as a very welcome early Christmas present!

 

Opening the C file

This season has opened for the Kenilworth C team with two away games at Banbury and Stratford.

The Banbury game saw the father-son combination of James and myself taking the black pieces on boards 4 and 2 respectively. Ben was on board 1, and Mark Senn on board 3. Everything started well, and at one point I was pretty sure we had winning positions on all four boards. But chess can be a cruel game!

First up, Ben somehow threw away his lead and left himself in a position that looked totally lost. I thought it was all over, but somehow Ben fought on and managed to pull off a draw. A very good result given how lost it looked. Then Mark tried a bit too hard to attack, but it did not come off, and that left him lost on board 3.

James and I continued to play on, and then I found a tactic that won me a couple of pawns and an overwhelmingly strong position. We played on for a bit, but the game was effectively over with fairly simple play from me, and the team score was now 1.5-1.5. Just James to finish.

James had a great position, and it really looked won. But it was his first league game, and he soon found himself in very serious time trouble in the endgame. Everything fell apart with only seconds left on the clock, and the game was lost. So it ended as a 1.5-2.5 loss for us, but there was lots of good chess to build on.

For the Stratford game, I moved up to board 1, and we had Gregory, Steph, and Mark Senn making up the rest of the team. Gregory got off to a flying start and began chasing the white king around the centre of the board. He quickly won a substantial amount of material and finished off the game with plenty of time to spare. Gregory is going to be an important asset for us this season, I am sure.

I did not get to see much of Steph's and Mark's games, but they appeared to be in very solid positions from early on and just kept up the pressure, winning material and maintaining strong positions. Before I knew it, they had both secured victories and we were 3-0 up.

Unfortunately, I was not able to complete a clean sweep. I had a good game but missed a key defensive move halfway through, which allowed my opponent to create a very strong passed d-pawn. I fought on, but I really needed a mistake from Black, which just did not happen. So we ended the night with a 3-1 scoreline.

A great win, and well done to Gregory, Steph, and Mark!

Next up we have our first home game, against Leamington C on 5 October.

Missed Opportunity

With IM James Jackson a noticeable absentee from the Banbury team last night, it looked like a golden opportunity for 2 points for our A team. Especially when you think that our B team did the double over Banbury A last year, even with an IM in the opposition ranks for both fixtures! Alas, it was not to be. Despite a substantial rating advantage on every board, by the end of the evening we had to come from behind to salvage a hard-fought draw. Not exactly the championship-winning form we have become used to in recent seasons.

It all started off promisingly enough, as Jude reeled off strong move after strong move on Board 1 against Georgs Vikanis to get a clear advantage. This included a beautiful knight manoeuvre from f6 to a monstrous square on d4. I failed to see the conclusion (as usual) but this was a very impressive game that seemed to be on a different level to the others going on around it! Georgs is a strong player (he must be, he has a massive plus score against me!) but Jude's victory looked inevitable from an early stage.

I was doing very well on Board 3 against Gary Jackson and I was pretty confident we would get at least a half point on the other two boards to get us over the finishing line for the win. But just when my position started to get out of control, the wheels came off in Keatan's and Josh's games. I hadn't appreciated how difficult Keatan's position had been against Tom Day from a very early stage, but the doubled White f pawns seemd to be far more important than the nominal advantage of bishop v knight. Since even with the Black knight on h5 for most of the game, it still held sway over Keatan's bishop. The next thing I knew there was an almight clock-bashing frenzy from both players, but when the excitement stopped, it became apparent that we had lost. A sad way for Keatan to say a temporary good-bye to the team (good luck at Uni, Keatan!), especially as by that stage Joshua had also lost to Paul Rowan. The game had been pretty tense, though Josh's decision to double the Black e pawns didn't seem to have worked out very well as the extra space this gave Paul's pieces seemed far more important than the discombobulated pawn structure. Apparently the end came in brutal fashion with Josh allowing his queen and rook to be forked by a pawn. Ouch! That's got to hurt.

But luckily for us, I managed (for once) to keep my head in some pretty serious time pressure and navigate my way to a win against Gary Jackson after we had gone down the same line of the Sicilian for the 5th time. (Taking my score to 5-0 in the process!) With opposite flank pawn storms against the enemy king, it was a race to see who could land the first blow. It should have been me, but I got side-tracked by the lure of a fairly irrelevant pawn and the position got very messy. However, my attack got a second wind, and despite a very dodgy looking back rank, I managed to win a piece, avoid a couple of banana skins, and take home the full point to rescue the match. And while the match score was 2-2, it was also White 0, Black 4 - which you don't see every day of the week.

So not too many gold stars to be distributed after this showing - except to Jude! We need to pull our socks up - and our fingers out! - on our next outing.

Never mind, though, there's always some great music out there to cheer everyone up.

Harry's Game

There was a mass outbreak of Harry the h-pawn madness in last night's encounter between our B team and Shirley A. On 3 of the 4 boards the move h4 had appeared before you could say Jack Robinson. As early as move 5 on board 3; on move 9 on board 1 and on a rather more relaxed move 12 (or so!) on Board 2. The Ginger GM, Simon Williams, would have loved it! Interestingly, though, on only one of the three did the move h5 ever happen, which would have disappointed him greatly! 

The first result of the evening came on Board 3 where Mike offered a draw to Jonathan Dale in a very complex position. And as neither of them seemingly wanted to play any more chess, the game finished when all 3 results were still possible. Immediately before this there had been excitement when Jonathan tried to make a capture with a piece that was pinned. Very luckily for him, he had no legal move with this piece, and neither could he take Mike's piece with anything else, so all he got for his illegal move was a 2 minute penalty. Followed by an immediate/concurrent draw offer.

Advantage Kenilworth soon after, when Joshua played a classic Pink game on Board 2, full of activity and bravado. Whether it was sound or not is another matter! But in the game, Owen Tompkins-Coll disastrously blocked his king's potential escape square on e7, so that when White crashed through down the open h file with a rook sac on h7. Black had to give up his queen to avoid mate and was left with just a rook against Joshua's rampant queen.

But it was back to all square when Ben went down on Board 4 against Dave Thomas. I missed the crucial phase of the game, but when I got a quick glance at the position I couldn't help noticing Ben was an exchange down - seemingly without much in the way of compensation. I imagine the extra rook soon overpowered the extra minor piece.

Leaving me to decide the match against Phil Purcell on Board 1. I was actually playing a good game and gradually imcreasing my advantage for much of the evening. Then I made a horrible move which flipped things completely and for a moment I thought I could be losing, or at best having to bale out with a perpetual. But in big time pressure Phil hesitated and I righted the ship. Play got a bit random (due to the clock) but I ended up in a queen ending with level pawns, but with the White queen and king totally tied down. I just needed to play one move with my king to put it on a non-checkable square and I would have been totally winning. But I rushed the winning idea and immediately took a loose pawn, which allowed the White queen to give a perpetual. Very annoying and very embarrassing, as I basically cost us the match victory and ruined a pretty well played game (albeit with one very dodgy intermediate phase!) Rats!

At least a 2-2 draw has got the B team on the scoreboard for the season, but this was a match where we could have hoped for better.

A bit of glorious and fantastical mayhem (in honour of Joshua's game!) to finish.

*For anyone who doesn't know, Harry's Game is the title of a brilliant, but very bleak, thriller by Gerald Seymour. Heartily recommended, but be warned - it's not exactly a barrel of laughs!

The Three Certainties: Death, Taxes and ........

........... the A team beating the B team. Except that there have been 3 extraordinary exceptions to this theoretically unbreakable rule since the B team was most recently promoted to Division 1 in 2019. From 12 matches played there have been 9 A team victories, 2 draws (2021-22 and 2024-25) and 1 glorious/disastrous B team victory - by a score of 3.5-0.5, no less (also 2024-25). As A team captain, club supremo and match fixer extraordinaire, I'm pleased to report that the 13th A v B encounter, which kicked off the new season on Monday night, kept reasonably close to the official script, with the A team notching a 3.5-0.5 victory. But, of course, nothing is ever as straightforward as you'd like it to be.

For most of the evening I thought the A team was going to chalk up wins on Boards 1 and 3 with the White pieces, as Jude and I seemed to be in control against Joshua and Ben respectively. But on the other 2 boards, the White pieces also looked to have the upper hand, as Mike and Gregory were giving Keatan and Rhys a tough time. Not for the first time, though, the final score showed little similarity with my reading of the likely outcome.

Jude, with a stratospheric ECF rating of over 2400, was the only person who bucked the trend. Although Joshua managed to get some activity with a queen and rook, Jude's king was rock solid and the unprotected Black queenside pawns began to fall off, and with the Black king also looking rather draughty, this game was the first to finish. Though, of course, I didn't see the conclusion so anything might have happened at the end!

It was then the turn of Rhys to add to the A team score, as he eventually emerged powerfully from a deeply-defensive set-up to jump out in Gregory's acute time trouble and transform the position into a big attack. Though again, I missed the conclusion, so I could be making some of this up!

Keatan had been labouring with a really grotty looking position against Mike for most of the evening - a backward pawn on c6 which needed perpetual defence from a bad bishop on b7 and an offside knight on a6 which didn't seem to be contributing much to the party. However, time pressure then became the key factor, though perversely it was Keatan who was in big trouble on the clock when Mike lost the thread and game. Consistently, I didn't see the end of this one either!

Which was because I was suffering the tortures of the damned against Ben. After an innocuous opening In gradually got the upper hand and Ben felt obliged to sacrifice his e pawn to give himself some space and piece activity.  But after some moves I was able to reorganise and swap off most of the pieces leaving us with rook and knight each and me having an extra pawn. Plus a rook on the 7th rank and a strong knight on e4, while Ben's rook somehow crawled out from a8 to e6 via b8 and b6 and his knight was stuck on e8 defending a pawn on c7. And to cap it all, Ben was in serious time trouble. I was so sure I was winning I completely overlooked the fact that when his rook eventually made it to e6 it was threatening to take my knight and answer a king recapture with the move Nf6 check winning my rook on d7. Ben, though, had seen it and played it instantly! Suddenly I was a piece down (for one measly pawn) and totally lost. Thankfully (for me) the game then degenerated into an almighty scramble during which I very luckily hoovered up all Ben's queenside pawns with my king, while retaining my own a pawn. And thankfully I was able to keep Ben's knight sufficiently tied down by the threat to advance this pawn to force a repetition - before his king entered the fray and started munching my two kingside pawns and queening his own h pawn. A very lucky escape for me. Always analyse checks and captures!!

So the points ended up with the A team, but except from Board 1, where Jude's play was a class (or two) above anything else on display that night, the other games were full of human frailty. As I very unoriginally said to Ben afterwards - "chess is a difficult game".

Just writing about the game has brought me out in a but of a cold sweat, so I think we need something with magical, restorative powers for this week's musical offering. I can hardly believe I've never posted this song before. Long overdue! 

Another Trophy!

Well, the season hasn't even started yet and we've already picked up a trophy! Last Tuesday night we made a sad/glad (delete as applicable) final visit to Tyseley Working Men's Club, to play in the 2026 edition of the Phil Holt Memorial, alongside teams from Olton (naturally), Halesowen and South Birmingham.

Phil was a stalwart of Olton, playing Board 1 for many, many years and was an absolute giant of the Leamington League - winning the League Blitz tournament, for instance, 14 times between 1996 and 2019,  and leading Olton to 18 league titles. He died tragically early at the age of just 52 in 2022 and the first memorial event was held the following summer, when we fielded 2 teams but didn't really trouble the leader board as Halesowen ran out winners. We weren't invited back in either 2024 or 2025, but this year we were there to take part in a 3 round all play all rapid event of 15' + 10 secs.

I managed to get a strong team together of people who were long standing friends of Phil, and my biggest problem was sorting out the board order, given there were just a handful of rating points between all 4 of us. In the end I chose to use chess activity as the determinant, so we lined up with Bruce on Board 1, me on 2, Andrew on 3 and Andy on 4. I rejected a suggestion by Andrew to order the team by handsome-ness, as that could only have led to large-scale civil war!

In round 1 we kicked off against Olton, who included 3 of their regular 4 LDCL A team, but we were in pretty imperious form and scored a 3.5-0.5 win, with onlyAndrew dropping a half point, though I gather he was winning earlier in the game, so it could easily have been 4-0. Which was the score we followed up with in each of the next 2 rounds against, first, South Birmingham and then Halesowen. The final round encounter on Board 1 between Stewart Fishburne and Bruce was very much in the spirit - if not the accuracy - of Phil's style of play and I'm sure he would have found it massively amusing. Stewart, with White, threw the kitchen sink at Bruce's king, but it was his own king that wound up the more exposed and it was eventually mated on h4 after a vicious counter-attack. This was unquestionably the game of the night from what I saw.

So, the final scores were:-

1 Kenilworth 11.5/12

2=Olton and Halesowen 4.5/12

4 South Birmingham 3.5/12

Our prize, apart from a very nice trophy, was to have the "privilege" of organising the 2027 event! 

Mark Page, whose selection and board order policies were totally vindicated by the results, receives the Phil Holt Memorial Trophy from Rob Reynolds of Olton.

Its been a long time since we had any music, so let's rectify that right now!

Great song. Not sure about the Confederate flags, though!

Game of the Month - July, 2026

Its been rather a long time (no need to be any more specific than that, thank you) since our last Game of the Month, but we're back with a bang, in the shape of a pair of tremendous wins by Jude against the mega-strong IM Brandon Clarke.

Jude had to take a bit of a sabbatical from chess in the first part of the year, due to the looming spectre of GCSE exams, but he has returned to the competitive arena with a series of tremendous results in recent weeks. First there was a 2nd= finish at the South Wales International, where he had an excellent win over GM Peter Wells, and then he actually managed to gain some more rating points as the lowest ranked player in the monstrously strong (Mickey Adams could only manage 50%!) Wood Green Invitational, all play all. But it seems as though he was just warming up in these two events, as he then racked up a superb 4th= placing at the Sussex University Masters which finished yesterday. This included draws against GMs Williams and Kovchan (and a very near miss of a whole point against GM Kjartansson) and wins over an IM and two FMs for a rating performance of 2424, just missing an IM norm! He's definitely redicovered his mojo - just in time for the British Championships.

There were some very impressive games I could have selected from these recent efforts, but instead I've gone back to last year for two splendid, but very contrasting, victories with the Black pieces. The first is ultra impressive, as he sacs a piece for a big kingside attack and then keeps the pressure right through to the end of the game when Brandon sportingly allowed Jude to finish with mate on the board. The second was very significant, as it was the game that got Jude over 2300 ELO and so secured his FM title. Brandon looked set to get his revenge for the earlier game, but Jude defended like a demon, rode his luck and then jumped out to deliver a crushing counter attack (boom!!), which culminated with him twice sacrificing his rook to force either checkmate or the win of the White queen.

This is chess from a much higher plane than most of us can even dream of. Hope you enjoy playing through the games as much as I have.