Admittedly not as quick as this, which even became a quick fire treble:-
But even so, a second win in 9 days for the B team over Solihull A was still pretty fast work. After a 2.5-1.5 home triumph last week, the team managed a 3-1 win in the away return match on Wednesday night. Both teams had been missing a couple of players for the first encounter (when the total grades were 7609 for us and 7376 for Solihull) but were beefed up for the return, with Solihull at 8129 and us virtually the same at 8114. A tight match could have been expected, with a draw the most likely outcome as all the individual match ups were pretty close, too.
Quite unusually, I was the first to finish with a 23 move win over Andrew McCumiskey on Board 2 - with Black! After a fairly mundane opening I was very slightly better when Andrew made a terrible blunder and lost a whole rook to a bishop sacrifice. Not a brilliancy on my part, but I'll take it!
It was even stranger that this was the first game to finish because the other three boards had all descended into instant chaos right from the off, in contrast to my turgid game. And in fact it took a long time for the second game to finish, when Bruce scored an excellent win against Don Mason on top board. Don eventually lost on time, but by that point Bruce was two exchanges to the good and about to win more material. I had thought that Don was outplaying Bruce on the queenside, especially when securing the d3 square for his pieces, but Bruce just went all in on the kingside and something must have gone badly wrong for Black - though, of course, I failed to see the decisive moments!
On Board 4 Rhys then agreed a draw with Ray Carpenter to clinch the match. The pawn formation had got blocked and there were no possible breaks for either side in the double rook ending. This was a quiet ending to a very exciting and challenging game where I couldn't ever decide whether Rhys was much better or much worse. (Well, chess is a difficult game!) Earlier I had noticed the return of a much loved KCC positional motif when Rhys acquired a fianchettoed knight on g7 - I hope Joshua, who was sitting next to him, appreciated this as much as I did. (For those of you who are bemused by these references, I would point you to this ancient article - even though, most regtrettably, the accompanying game no longer appears, due to technical reasons which are far too complicated for me.)
Which brings us to the man himself, on Board 3. I doubt there has ever been another KCC match where I have finished first and he has finished last. He wheeled out an interesting pawn sac in the opening which caused some difficulties for the Black king and piece development, but Akshat Shivakumar very carefully unravelled his pieces and despite further tactical interludes the game eventually came down to a ridiculously difficult minor piece ending, but with Joshua still a pawn down. However, that didn't tell half the story. Joshua had bishop against knight and each side had two connected passed pawns - Joshua a and b, Akshat e and f. It looked grim for Josh, though, as the Black king was very strong and the White pawns were unable to advance. However, despite going down to about 3 seconds on his clock, Josh's defence was inspired and he managed to hold the position by sacrificing his two passed pawns to distract the Black knight and then eliminate all bar one of the Black pawns, so that he could sacrifice his bishop for the draw. By the way, I don;t know what the rule is about this, but the clock they were playing with had the sound turned on, so that it beeped loudly when Joshua's time went under 10 seconds and then again - even louder at 5 seconds! Whether he would have noticed he was about to lose on time without the audio interruption I don't know, but I suspect that the sound really should not be switched on to give players what amounts to outside assistance.
Music time. Autumn's here, so this seems quite appropriate.
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