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
McCarthy V Ellis – Click link to view this game on a full page
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.
