Half a match report

To try and once again provide a contrast to Mark's laziness in often combining 2 matches into one report, I present here information from the first half of Monday's Kenilworth B game against Solihull.

The first game to finish, not unusually was mine, though for this case the incompetence that caused this was not my own. I was playing the white side of a Ponziani, what we can all agree is one of the most dynamic and exciting openings in chess, and somehow my opponent (John Raouf) managed to bungle into losing a piece by move thirteen, as in the position below:

I can't say I did much to earn it, but I'm certainly not going to complain about the result. Although the game did last for another 16 moves and until my opponent had 11 seconds left, he remained at least a piece down for the entirety of that time.

At that point I had to leave the b=venue for the evening, with the state of play in the other games as follows:

Don Mason - Andrew Paterson: One of those weird Sicilians where white castles queenside, and Andrew as black leaves his king in the centre, plays gxf6 after a bishop captures a knight, and it all looked very scary. Captain's prediction - any result other than a draw

Ray Carpenter - Mike Donnelly: An opening where both sides basically ignored what the other person was doing, with Ray adopting a Stonewall setup and Mike initially some kind of Benoni. After some maneuvering it appeared that Mike was losing a pawn, which white then very generously appeared to give straight back for unclear reasons, to leave a fairly level position. Captain's prediction - draw

Bernard Charnley - Julian Summerfield: It was good to see Bernard back at the board, and with a new found appreciation for unsophisticated hacking attacks. He played a King's Indian Attack, and proceeded to have pawns on f6, g5 and h4 extremely quickly, with some heavy pieces ready to join the attack. Captain's prediction - Bernard victory.

I saw no further action after this point. I have no idea what happened. However, the results were:

Don Mason - Andrew Paterson: Draw

Ray Carpenter - Mike Donnelly: Mike wins

Bernard Charnley - Julian Summerfield: Bernard loses

Good to see my grasp of chess positions is as accurate as ever. Still, that makes yet another 2.5-1.5 win for the team, and continues our record of only losing against our own club colleagues.