Our Richard Furness League side played their first game of the season with a visit to Atherton.
This is a grade limited competition where sides are made up of 4 players who need to have a combined team grade of 6600 or under. This leads to some interesting strategies, some sides choose to field sides of players all around the 1600 mark whilst others try to load the top boards with lower rated players on the bottom boards. The sides chose differing strategies with their line ups for this match where Atherton had a very strong player on board 1.
In the end it was the Atherton plan that paid off as they managed to win the fixture 3-1. Nick has kindly annotated his own game below against Lee Kay one of our league’s strongest players whom he had the opportunity to play against.
Our new season finally got underway as we played host to Skelmersdale. Whilst on paper the opposition had lower grades then us we knew from experience not to take them lightly, we have dropped points against this tricky side before.
The first board to finish was Alex on board 5. Lee Walls from Skelmersdale managed to win material early on in a French defence with a Queen raid. I didn’t quite see the end but Walls obviously was able to extradite his Queen and hold onto the gained material, 0-1
After some time the match score was levelled, Marek and Paul Stanley’s game looked to have been close throughout in a Sicilian Alapin where Marek had the Black pieces. As the pieces came off Marek managed to win a pawn with a sneaky tactic. Paul managed to swap all the pieces off barring a pair of bishops each and Marek managed to keep on just enough pawns to secure the victory! 1-1
Andy Coe soon put us in front, I didn’t see a great deal of Andy’s game but I’m told he felt he always had a bit of an advantage and managed to convert this well before the end phase of the game 2-1
This left (as is not so unusual as we are the undoubted slowest players) both myself and Rob as the last games to finish. I haven’t posted one of my own games on this blog in a while, but I will on this occasion as I think this was really interesting. Gareth went for a rather slow strategy (I thought) of spending a bunch of tempo in the opening with the aim of trading off his bad bishop. I decided to allow this to happen figuring that the amount of time he’s spent doing this will give me a big lead in development. I therefore sacrificed an early pawn and later a Knight for some unclear longer term compensation. Fortunately this panned out and I managed to win on this occasion. I was pleased to see when I got home that both of the sacrifices were sound! I’ve put a link to the game at the top of the page in-case it is of interest. This result put us out of reach for the match score. 3-1
Finally on board 3 Rob was the last game to finish against Paul Massey, this game looked to swing back and forth with Rob having an extra bishop for a phase but Paul had some dangerous passed pawns. With both players getting short of time Massey liquidated into a pawn up Rook and pawns endgame. Tragically, just when it looked like Rob may be about to hold the draw a dreaded blunder occurred with just seconds left on his clock. 3-2
A closely fought match played in a friendly spirit, good luck to Skelmersdale for the rest of the season.
Unlike football chess doesn’t have a transfer window. If it did our club would be seen as one of the more active in the ‘market’ with no less than 5 new members joining during the summer recess. Together with a few of our existing members the new intake made club nights vibrant and worth attending – something that had rarely been the case in recent years. Their enthusiasm for the club and the game of chess was a tremendous bonus and illustrated what a difference just a few people can make in a short space of time.
The British Chess Championships were held this year on our doorstep in Liverpool and some of our members participated in them – and in some cases in more than one section. Jonathan Miller was in the prize money in the U1600 section, but found the going rather tougher in the Over 50’s section which was peppered with players of master strength. Shlok Maheshwari did very well in the U12 Rapidplay whilst Damian McCarthy and Andy Coe performed creditably in the Major section. Shlok also enjoyed immense success in the Major section of the Leyland Congress where he finished 4th having been ranked 17th before the start of play.
At our AGM it was decided that the annual membership fee would be pegged once again at £20 and not be payable until a member had completed 4 games in either League or Cup matches. So playing chess for Culcheth remains a very inexpensive hobby.
The new season is well and truly upon us and we have teams in Divisions 1 and 2, the Richard Furness League, two in the Peninsular Cup as well as one in both the Kalmar Cup and George Davison Shield. As current holders our victory in the first round of the Kalmar Cup at Atherton was very satisfying, and our B Teams first match in Division 2 ended in a creditable draw at Northwich. It’s a long season comprised of dozens of tough matches but the early indications are positive and, thanks to our new members, we have a larger than anticipated squad from which to draw. Onwards and upwards!
