Tonight's victims were the fine people of Olton. They decided to field 2 players named Reynolds on the bottom 2 boards, all but guaranteeing 2 draws would occur, and so it duly proved. Harry was the first to finish, in a game somewhat lacking in sparkling excitement. The Robert variety of Reynolds played an early b3 setup, Harry easily equalised, and then nothing much happened until a draw was agreed. Mike's game was at least a little more interesting, as he had the decency to sacrifice/blunder a pawn at some point on the white side of a Queen's gambit accepted, but appeared to end up with almost exactly 1 pawn's worth of compensation, so once again a draw was agreed relatively early.
That left Andy and myself to decide the match. I had (unusually for me) a relatively successful opening as black, and was soon a little better against Mark Cundy in a Caro-Kann. By move 40 we had reached the following R+4 against R+3 endgame.
Now, unlike R+3 versus R+2, some 4v3 endgames actually give the stronger side winning chances. Unfortunately, I don't think this is one of them, and I compounded the issue by quickly bungling into a position where the only way I could even try and make progress was to swap a pair of pawns off into said 3v2 endgame. However, since Andy was better but not yet winning against Alan Lloyd at this point, I thought I might as well play on.
Fortunately, my appalling technique was not to prove an issue in the end, as Andy did indeed bring home the match for us, defeating Alan in very much his own style. Andy played 1.g3 and then a very slow setup against the KID. He then proceeded to very slowly advance his kingside pawns against Alan's king which, combined with some seemingly well calculated tactics, eventually won material and left him with 2 unstoppable connected past pawns. Seemed like a well played game as far as I could tell (not that anyone should trust my analysis of these things).
At this point I really should have offered a draw to win the match, but basically by the process of inertia I continued to limp on for a few more moves. Eventually, after 114 moves and with the last pawns about to be swapped off a draw was finally agreed, with I'm pretty certain no progress at all ever having been made from the position at move 40 above.
However, with Andy's victory, a 2.5-1.5 win was achieved, and we are once again (temporarily) on top of the table.
I should say that having watched live from move 40 to 114 my only conclusion was that Mr Pink knew the time of his train departure and had decided to spend the waiting time shuffling pieces on a chess board rather than shuffling his feet on a very cold platform......
ReplyDeleteAndy's inexorable squeeze made for much more entertaining viewing!