Wednesday 30 April 2014

End of the line

Mark has delegated the writing of this match report to me, I believe because he cannot bring himself to suitably praise the awe-inspiring brilliancy of my play (more on that later). Last night was the final A team league game of the season, and we travelled to Leamington with our hosts needing a draw to avoid relegation, so no chance of an easy end of season game against a team lacking motivation.

Andy Collins vs Phil Wood

Phil adopted the intriguing strategic idea of playing the classical Dutch, then moving all his pawns and pieces away from the defence of the e6 pawn, then blocking of all the possible squares he would ever be able to defend it from, then allowing his opponent to play Ng5, winning the pawn and forking a queen and rook on f8 and d8. There then followed that age old chess question; are a rook and a pawn better than a bishop? Unfortunately for Phil the answer, as always, was yes and his opponent quickly rapped up the game.

Leamington 1 - Kenilworth 0

Carl Pickering vs Tom Darling

Carl played the Veresov (1.d4 d5 2.Nc3 Nf6 3.Bg5) and, after taking on f6, reached a very nice position where black's doubled pawns gave him a huge number of targets to attack. Black was never able to repair his structure and eventually went down in an endgame where white's knight completely dominated black's bishop.

Leamington 1 - Kenilworth 1

Mark Page vs Dan Aldridge

After playing a slightly unusual anti-Sicilian line (1.e4 c5 2. Nc3 Nc6 3. Bb5) Mark reached a point where he had the two bishops, but the blocked nature of the position made them very hard to utilise, and he may even have been slightly worse. However, in time pressure, his opponent very obligingly pushed forward in the centre, opening up diagonals for the bishops against his king, and a level position transformed into a crushing mating attack in no time at all.

Leamington 1 - Kenilworth 2

Steve Burnell vs Joshua Pink

Since it was the end of the season, I decided the time was right to have a massive hack at one of my opponents. It did at least lead to an interesting game.

Final score: Leamington 1 - Kenilworth 3

And so, as Mark finds himself banned from the city of Leamington after helping to relegate his former team, the rest of us look forward to the cup final in May and wonder, as we so often do, which piece Phil will blunder in that match.

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