“After a few years’ absence from competitive play in the WDCL Wigan chess club is back in action and our Peninsular Cup 2nd team had been drawn to play against them at their venue in the first round of the tournament.
As captain I got off to a bad start by losing the toss, but with our 1 point handicap advantage I remained optimistic that we could pull off an upset, just as we had done at St. Helens last year.
My optimism started to look rather misplaced when James Gladman and Shlok Maheshwari lost their games on Boards 5 and 3 respectively fairly quickly. However, despite having had very little over the board experience last season, Vince Shanahan triumphed in style on Board 4. So, if John Reyes on Board 2 and I on Board 1 could muster just one point the match would officially end at 3-3 and we would win under the tie break rules. Easier said than done, and despite a valiant effort John had to resign leaving yours truly to try to secure the required point.
My opponent, Nathan Talbot had not played competitive over the board chess since 2021 when his ECF rating was a very impressive 2088 and he was undoubtedly a little rusty. Even so, armed with the White pieces he got the better of the opening and early middlegame. I found myself very much on the back foot and consumed far too much time calculating my defensive options – this was to cost me dearly. To my surprise (and relief) Nathan played a sequence of decidedly suboptimal moves in pursuit of a winning attack which simply was not ‘there’ and I found myself in a clearly winning position. But even with the 10 second time increment I failed to move quickly enough and lost on time thus letting both myself and, more importantly, my team down.”
Game below to view from Nick’s annotation of his game v Nathan Talbot.