People might be surprised at seeing a B team report on this website, given Ben's repeated tardiness on this matter. However, given Kenilworth's new status as a sportswashing enterprise for rich Middle Eastern dictatorships, and the fact this has enable us to import a whole range of expensive new strong players into the team, I find myself demoted into the ranks of the mob. With such positive thoughts in mind, I found myself lining up against Leamington this week, with our two teams the two most at risk of relegation from the first division this season.
Pleasingly, my game continued in much the same way as most have recently, when I got a wretched position out of the opening against Tom Darling. He played a King's Gambit, and I adopted the original strategy of both not taking the pawn but him still having the standard compensation for the pawn I hadn't taken. The fact that my ninth and tenth moves were Kf8 and f5 should tell you that not all went to plan. Fortunately, a timely exchange sacrifice and some tactics enabled me to ultimately scramble into a pawn down endgame that was ultimately holdable - a fine result I think we can all agree, and one undoubtedly worthy of promotion back to the first team.
Fortunately, other players in the team were achieving more success than I was. Bernard's game was an interesting case study in how it is possible to lose material with gaining any compensation. What seemed like a fairly normal game was punctuated every 10 moves or so by Bernard taking one of Andrew Collins' pawns. You would have thought that eventually this would lead to Andrew having at least some compensation, but this never appears to be the case. By 2.5 hours of this Bernard was up by 4 pawns and still there was no compensation, so Andrew had to resign. Ed had an even more comfortable looking win, with some quick tactics revolving around a piece sacrifice that couldn't be taking as it led to his opponent's queen being trapped leading to a winning attack. With those two decent wins and my extremely high quality draw (hint, hint, first team selectors) the match was secured.
That just leaves Mike's game to discuss, and I hope he won't be offended if I say it was about as much a Mike game as you are ever going to see. He started by building up an excellent strategic advantage, then won a pawn, leaving him with what must have been a winning position. Then his opponent's queen went on an adventure, meaning for a good few moves it looks like Mike was about to trap it, but he never did, and the pawn was lost back. Then, in a relatively level endgame, Mike was short of time so offered a draw, which his opponent declined. Then, two moves later, Mike won a whole piece with a back-rank mating trick and was completely winning once again, but had to agree a draw as he only had a minute left on the clock. Rarely can someone have so outplayed his opponent consistently for 3 hours, and still only ended up this half a point.
Still, a success overall, and look like Kenilworth are on the verge of still having two teams in the first division next season.
Whilst I can't support Mark's approach of constantly attaching songs to this blog - mostly because I almost never know what he is talking about - but on this occasion I should add this, to match up to the title of this piece:
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