First Home Win

 It is that time of year when the nights are drawing in, and we are having to drive to matches in the gathering darkness. While there is yet to be a nip of frost in the air, Kenilworth v Solihull matches always generate a good competitive atmosphere to enjoy.

Both teams were a little depleted for yesterday's encounter. Solihull A were without Don Mason and Aksath Sivakumar. Equally, we were missing Mark and Bruce, and it looked set to be a tight contest. As it turned out, it was never a match that we looked in danger of losing, but whether we were going to win or draw went to the wire.

Rhys opened Kenilworth B's account with a fine win on Board 3 against Tony Sadler. While I was sitting next to Rhys, I must confess I didn't see much of the action. However, Tony didn't look particularly happy throughout the proceedings, and at certain points sighed a sigh that all chess players will empathise with. I wasn't surprised when he resigned.

I was next to finish on Board 4 against Matthew Allen. This was the game where we had the biggest ratings advantage, but Matthew is a very solid player, and my recent "exploits" for the C team (see Dan's recent post) meant that I was quite apprehensive. According to Fritz, the position was dead level in the middle game, with Matthew pushing on the Queenside and threatening to open the centre, while I was looking to consolidate. I eventually managed to find a tactic that won the exchange, but Matthew still had a lot of play. I negotiated his threats quite well, but at the expense of my clock, and found myself with three minutes to his thirty. However, the beauty of having played in the ECF 3/2 Blitz qualifier at the weekend was that this still felt like a lot. I held my nerve. Matthew made an illegal move and resigned, but I had a forced mate by this point. So 2-0.

Joshua's game against Andrew McCumiskey on Board 1 was another I didn't see much of, but Andrew seemed to force an unstoppable pawn through to the seventh rank moments after my game had finished, leaving Joshua with no choice but to resign. Having been destroyed twice by Andrew last season, Joshua had at least put up a much better fight than I'd managed in my games with him.

So it was all on Mike to get us over the line, against Ray Carpenter on Board 2. Mike was up by a piece to two pawns, with a lot of heavy wood (but no queens) still on the board, in a massively unclear position. They were both below 5 minutes by this point and when Mike offered a draw, Ray agonised before accepting the offer. 

So a 2.5 - 1.5 win for us, which could prove to be very valuable as the season unfolds.

We've got the return leg at Solihull next week. Hopefully there still won't be any frost, and it's not like the nights will have drawn in much further between then and now. Still, you never know... Doing the double over Solihull A would certainly count as a very welcome early Christmas present!

 

Opening the C file

This season has opened for the Kenilworth C team with two away games at Banbury and Stratford.

The Banbury game saw the father-son combination of James and myself taking the black pieces on boards 4 and 2 respectively. Ben was on board 1, and Mark Senn on board 3. Everything started well, and at one point I was pretty sure we had winning positions on all four boards. But chess can be a cruel game!

First up, Ben somehow threw away his lead and left himself in a position that looked totally lost. I thought it was all over, but somehow Ben fought on and managed to pull off a draw. A very good result given how lost it looked. Then Mark tried a bit too hard to attack, but it did not come off, and that left him lost on board 3.

James and I continued to play on, and then I found a tactic that won me a couple of pawns and an overwhelmingly strong position. We played on for a bit, but the game was effectively over with fairly simple play from me, and the team score was now 1.5-1.5. Just James to finish.

James had a great position, and it really looked won. But it was his first league game, and he soon found himself in very serious time trouble in the endgame. Everything fell apart with only seconds left on the clock, and the game was lost. So it ended as a 1.5-2.5 loss for us, but there was lots of good chess to build on.

For the Stratford game, I moved up to board 1, and we had Gregory, Steph, and Mark Senn making up the rest of the team. Gregory got off to a flying start and began chasing the white king around the centre of the board. He quickly won a substantial amount of material and finished off the game with plenty of time to spare. Gregory is going to be an important asset for us this season, I am sure.

I did not get to see much of Steph's and Mark's games, but they appeared to be in very solid positions from early on and just kept up the pressure, winning material and maintaining strong positions. Before I knew it, they had both secured victories and we were 3-0 up.

Unfortunately, I was not able to complete a clean sweep. I had a good game but missed a key defensive move halfway through, which allowed my opponent to create a very strong passed d-pawn. I fought on, but I really needed a mistake from Black, which just did not happen. So we ended the night with a 3-1 scoreline.

A great win, and well done to Gregory, Steph, and Mark!

Next up we have our first home game, against Leamington C on 5 October.

Missed Opportunity

With IM James Jackson a noticeable absentee from the Banbury team last night, it looked like a golden opportunity for 2 points for our A team. Especially when you think that our B team did the double over Banbury A last year, even with an IM in the opposition ranks for both fixtures! Alas, it was not to be. Despite a substantial rating advantage on every board, by the end of the evening we had to come from behind to salvage a hard-fought draw. Not exactly the championship-winning form we have become used to in recent seasons.

It all started off promisingly enough, as Jude reeled off strong move after strong move on Board 1 against Georgs Vikanis to get a clear advantage. This included a beautiful knight manoeuvre from f6 to a monstrous square on d4. I failed to see the conclusion (as usual) but this was a very impressive game that seemed to be on a different level to the others going on around it! Georgs is a strong player (he must be, he has a massive plus score against me!) but Jude's victory looked inevitable from an early stage.

I was doing very well on Board 3 against Gary Jackson and I was pretty confident we would get at least a half point on the other two boards to get us over the finishing line for the win. But just when my position started to get out of control, the wheels came off in Keatan's and Josh's games. I hadn't appreciated how difficult Keatan's position had been against Tom Day from a very early stage, but the doubled White f pawns seemd to be far more important than the nominal advantage of bishop v knight. Since even with the Black knight on h5 for most of the game, it still held sway over Keatan's bishop. The next thing I knew there was an almight clock-bashing frenzy from both players, but when the excitement stopped, it became apparent that we had lost. A sad way for Keatan to say a temporary good-bye to the team (good luck at Uni, Keatan!), especially as by that stage Joshua had also lost to Paul Rowan. The game had been pretty tense, though Josh's decision to double the Black e pawns didn't seem to have worked out very well as the extra space this gave Paul's pieces seemed far more important than the discombobulated pawn structure. Apparently the end came in brutal fashion with Josh allowing his queen and rook to be forked by a pawn. Ouch! That's got to hurt.

But luckily for us, I managed (for once) to keep my head in some pretty serious time pressure and navigate my way to a win against Gary Jackson after we had gone down the same line of the Sicilian for the 5th time. (Taking my score to 5-0 in the process!) With opposite flank pawn storms against the enemy king, it was a race to see who could land the first blow. It should have been me, but I got side-tracked by the lure of a fairly irrelevant pawn and the position got very messy. However, my attack got a second wind, and despite a very dodgy looking back rank, I managed to win a piece, avoid a couple of banana skins, and take home the full point to rescue the match. And while the match score was 2-2, it was also White 0, Black 4 - which you don't see every day of the week.

So not too many gold stars to be distributed after this showing - except to Jude! We need to pull our socks up - and our fingers out! - on our next outing.

Never mind, though, there's always some great music out there to cheer everyone up.

Harry's Game

There was a mass outbreak of Harry the h-pawn madness in last night's encounter between our B team and Shirley A. On 3 of the 4 boards the move h4 had appeared before you could say Jack Robinson. As early as move 5 on board 3; on move 9 on board 1 and on a rather more relaxed move 12 (or so!) on Board 2. The Ginger GM, Simon Williams, would have loved it! Interestingly, though, on only one of the three did the move h5 ever happen, which would have disappointed him greatly! 

The first result of the evening came on Board 3 where Mike offered a draw to Jonathan Dale in a very complex position. And as neither of them seemingly wanted to play any more chess, the game finished when all 3 results were still possible. Immediately before this there had been excitement when Jonathan tried to make a capture with a piece that was pinned. Very luckily for him, he had no legal move with this piece, and neither could he take Mike's piece with anything else, so all he got for his illegal move was a 2 minute penalty. Followed by an immediate/concurrent draw offer.

Advantage Kenilworth soon after, when Joshua played a classic Pink game on Board 2, full of activity and bravado. Whether it was sound or not is another matter! But in the game, Owen Tompkins-Coll disastrously blocked his king's potential escape square on e7, so that when White crashed through down the open h file with a rook sac on h7. Black had to give up his queen to avoid mate and was left with just a rook against Joshua's rampant queen.

But it was back to all square when Ben went down on Board 4 against Dave Thomas. I missed the crucial phase of the game, but when I got a quick glance at the position I couldn't help noticing Ben was an exchange down - seemingly without much in the way of compensation. I imagine the extra rook soon overpowered the extra minor piece.

Leaving me to decide the match against Phil Purcell on Board 1. I was actually playing a good game and gradually imcreasing my advantage for much of the evening. Then I made a horrible move which flipped things completely and for a moment I thought I could be losing, or at best having to bale out with a perpetual. But in big time pressure Phil hesitated and I righted the ship. Play got a bit random (due to the clock) but I ended up in a queen ending with level pawns, but with the White queen and king totally tied down. I just needed to play one move with my king to put it on a non-checkable square and I would have been totally winning. But I rushed the winning idea and immediately took a loose pawn, which allowed the White queen to give a perpetual. Very annoying and very embarrassing, as I basically cost us the match victory and ruined a pretty well played game (albeit with one very dodgy intermediate phase!) Rats!

At least a 2-2 draw has got the B team on the scoreboard for the season, but this was a match where we could have hoped for better.

A bit of glorious and fantastical mayhem (in honour of Joshua's game!) to finish.

*For anyone who doesn't know, Harry's Game is the title of a brilliant, but very bleak, thriller by Gerald Seymour. Heartily recommended, but be warned - it's not exactly a barrel of laughs!

The Three Certainties: Death, Taxes and ........

........... the A team beating the B team. Except that there have been 3 extraordinary exceptions to this theoretically unbreakable rule since the B team was most recently promoted to Division 1 in 2019. From 12 matches played there have been 9 A team victories, 2 draws (2021-22 and 2024-25) and 1 glorious/disastrous B team victory - by a score of 3.5-0.5, no less (also 2024-25). As A team captain, club supremo and match fixer extraordinaire, I'm pleased to report that the 13th A v B encounter, which kicked off the new season on Monday night, kept reasonably close to the official script, with the A team notching a 3.5-0.5 victory. But, of course, nothing is ever as straightforward as you'd like it to be.

For most of the evening I thought the A team was going to chalk up wins on Boards 1 and 3 with the White pieces, as Jude and I seemed to be in control against Joshua and Ben respectively. But on the other 2 boards, the White pieces also looked to have the upper hand, as Mike and Gregory were giving Keatan and Rhys a tough time. Not for the first time, though, the final score showed little similarity with my reading of the likely outcome.

Jude, with a stratospheric ECF rating of over 2400, was the only person who bucked the trend. Although Joshua managed to get some activity with a queen and rook, Jude's king was rock solid and the unprotected Black queenside pawns began to fall off, and with the Black king also looking rather draughty, this game was the first to finish. Though, of course, I didn't see the conclusion so anything might have happened at the end!

It was then the turn of Rhys to add to the A team score, as he eventually emerged powerfully from a deeply-defensive set-up to jump out in Gregory's acute time trouble and transform the position into a big attack. Though again, I missed the conclusion, so I could be making some of this up!

Keatan had been labouring with a really grotty looking position against Mike for most of the evening - a backward pawn on c6 which needed perpetual defence from a bad bishop on b7 and an offside knight on a6 which didn't seem to be contributing much to the party. However, time pressure then became the key factor, though perversely it was Keatan who was in big trouble on the clock when Mike lost the thread and game. Consistently, I didn't see the end of this one either!

Which was because I was suffering the tortures of the damned against Ben. After an innocuous opening In gradually got the upper hand and Ben felt obliged to sacrifice his e pawn to give himself some space and piece activity.  But after some moves I was able to reorganise and swap off most of the pieces leaving us with rook and knight each and me having an extra pawn. Plus a rook on the 7th rank and a strong knight on e4, while Ben's rook somehow crawled out from a8 to e6 via b8 and b6 and his knight was stuck on e8 defending a pawn on c7. And to cap it all, Ben was in serious time trouble. I was so sure I was winning I completely overlooked the fact that when his rook eventually made it to e6 it was threatening to take my knight and answer a king recapture with the move Nf6 check winning my rook on d7. Ben, though, had seen it and played it instantly! Suddenly I was a piece down (for one measly pawn) and totally lost. Thankfully (for me) the game then degenerated into an almighty scramble during which I very luckily hoovered up all Ben's queenside pawns with my king, while retaining my own a pawn. And thankfully I was able to keep Ben's knight sufficiently tied down by the threat to advance this pawn to force a repetition - before his king entered the fray and started munching my two kingside pawns and queening his own h pawn. A very lucky escape for me. Always analyse checks and captures!!

So the points ended up with the A team, but except from Board 1, where Jude's play was a class (or two) above anything else on display that night, the other games were full of human frailty. As I very unoriginally said to Ben afterwards - "chess is a difficult game".

Just writing about the game has brought me out in a but of a cold sweat, so I think we need something with magical, restorative powers for this week's musical offering. I can hardly believe I've never posted this song before. Long overdue!