Brave New World

KCC made its match debut in the online world last night, and emerged victorious by 6-4 in a friendly against Nuneaton. The match was played on chess.com, over 5 boards, double round, with a time limit of 15 mins + 10 secs for each game.

We had tried to balance the teams to provide a close contest, but our plans were slightly derailed when Bruce's plan to participate from his car in Tesco's car park, Hereford, was thwarted by technological problems. Luckily, Joshua was on stand by to deputise at the last moment, although this did somewhat tilt the balance in our favour. Nevertheless, in ECF terms, there was not much between the teams except on Board 4, where Ben was a strong favourite. But more of that anon!

So the team which actually took to the field in this ground breaking encounter was:-

1 Mike
2 Bernard C
3 Joshua
4 Ben
5 Billy
(Teams had to play in order of their chess.com rapidplay rating)

I joined the massed throng of spectators (0) towards the end of Round 1, and was delighted to see that Billy had already won convincingly with the Black pieces over John Rayner (last seen drawing with Dave in the KO Cup Semi-Final!). But this was balanced by a dreadful loss by Joshua against Colin Green which featured the blundering of a bishop on move 7. He says it was a mouse slip, but in about 3 months of on-line club nights, he hasn't perpetrated a single one of them, so I have my doubts. We were back in front when Bernard scored a tremendous win over Paul Davies on Board 2, where he found a fantastic sequence of positive moves. No wonder Paul eventually dropped his queen under such pressure. This easily got my vote for Game of the Match.




Regrettably, though, my arrival found Ben in a rather dreadful position, and his junior opponent, Thomas Glenn, despatched him with considerable efficiency to level the scores! However, we still went into the second round with a 1 point lead after Mike defeated Tony Green with Black on top board after a truly chaotic and very complicated game. However, at the end it became obvious to me that there could only be one outcome to this chaos - Tony would lose on time. And the inevitable duly came to pass!

And so to Round 2.

Joshua made up for his disastrous showing in Round 1 with a quick win, that ended with the crushing Nf6+ winning the Black queen. Billy almost made it 2/2 on the evening, but after winning an exchange he wasn't able to finish Black off, and had to settle for a draw. Things looked distinctly dodgy for Mike on Board 1, but perhaps Tony had been unnerved by the events of game 1, as he agreed to a draw when he seemed to have a clear advantage. Something went very wrong for Bernard in the opening, and by the time I saw the position he was an exchange down and facing two connected queenside pawns. He somehow conjured up tremendous counterplay with a rook and two mighty bishops, but just when I thought he had a draw within reach he went wrong and the material advantage became too great to fight against. So the match was in the balance at 5-4 to us, but thankfully Ben made no mistake this time around and secured a dominating endgame win, finishing too many pawns up to count, and clinching a 6-4 victory for KCC.

No-one on either side scored 0/2, so the plan to try and balance the teams was pretty successful, despite our last minute enforced reshuffle.

Apart from Bruce's technological woes, I think everyone enjoyed the experience and it seemed to go pretty smoothly, for which thanks are due to Joshua and Paul Davies, who were the respective team administrators, while myself and Colin Green had rounded up the players. And thanks to Nuneaton in general for inviting us to play, and for helping us while we got familiar with the process.

There might soon be a small summer league for a few local clubs, and I would hope that we will be able to raise at least one team, and preferrably two. To that end, anyone else who would like to throw their hat into the ring for future matches should in the first instance join the chess.com Kenilworth on-line club here. (And don't forget our lichess club where we run our Thursday night club evenings every week. Contact Joshua for details if you haven't already joined.)