After fielding a far from full strength team in our opening fixture, our A team side had more familiar faces this time around with only Tom Quilter missing from our full strength line up.
Our opposition Winwick have been fighting relegation in the WDCL top tier for the past few seasons, they themselves were missing their regular board 1 Simon Myles.
As the match began Ilya arrived a few minutes late as is customary for him due to having to travel to the match straight from work. Personally after a day at work, playing chess afterwards is something I always struggle to do well, but it did not seem to affect Ilya as he quickly set about gaining the upper hand in his game.
The first result of the night came on the top board where Ian Dutton, playing the second game of his latest ‘comeback’, was against Simeon Sakic. From an offbeat Sicilian Ian stated afterwards that he was not entirely satisfied with the opening position and therefore offered an early draw. This was accepted by Sakic, 0.5 – 0.5
The next two results followed about half an hour later. Ilya on board 5 was facing Ben O’Rourke. From what I saw of the game Ilya managed to obtain a French advanced type pawn structure as Black but without the usual bad light squared Bishop. From such a solid positional foundation he proceeded to outplay his opponent winning a number of pawns and soon after his opponent resigned while still in the middlegame 0.5 – 1.5.
On board three Damian was facing Dave Stuttard. Dave had improved upon his opening from our last encounter but nevertheless I felt that Black had gained a slight advantage after the opening few moves. Dave has a keen eye for a tactic and in the early middlegame he was tempted to try a double piece sacrifice in an attempt to open up Damian’s still uncastled King. Unfortunately for White his position was nowhere near ready for this sacrifice as most of his pieces were still undeveloped. By the time the position below emerged Black had an overwhelming material advantage, Dave played on until Black had re-coordinated and then resigned. 0.5-2.5.
Stuttard V McCarthy after 15.e6+
These results left us just requiring a further half point to secure the match.
On board 2 we had Marek as White against Richard Clissold and on board 4 Rob Furness also had the White pieces against Ken Johnson.
These last two boards went on well past ten o clock, Marek seemed under some pressure in the dynamic position in the image below.
Robert’s game looked like a typical example of the pressure the English opening can apply as after winning the A file for is Rook and Queen Rob began probing for a weakness. In response Black needs to really have kingside attacking chances in his favour, but Ken’s attack seemed to be a long way behind.
As both games neared their conclusion Marek’s game seemed to have taken a turn for the worse. Clissold had managed to win a pawn and force off the exchange of all the heavy pieces. For a brief moment in the position below watching I wondered if Marek could even win with Bxf6!?
Bxf6 played in the game…
and indeed after Bxf6 it would have been good enough for the win if Clissold responded with Kxf6… When after Kd7 White will be the one promoting the e pawn.
However seeing the danger Clissold instead played the calm Kxe6 which gave Black a winning advantage as White was then unable to stop one of the black pawns from promoting…
Unfortunately it seems there is no defending this endgame for White.
Whether or not Rob was fully aware of Marek’s predicament on board 2 I am not sure, however he was undoubtably slightly better but Ken had stoically defended his pawn weaknesses to the point that Rob now had under two minutes on his clock. Given the new WDCL adopted time controls this is not quite the dire situation that it was of previous seasons (we now get a 10 second increment per move) to the relief of his Captain Rob offered the draw which when accepted by Ken got us over the line for the win.
Marek resigned his position shortly after this to give us a narrow win of 3-2
A very early league table
