Last night saw our B team go to Cheddleton to take on the only 100% team in the NSDCA, without our top player. The Bees were huge underdogs with a team rating over 600 pts lower than Cheddleton A, and the top two boards making up 500 pts of the deficit. Early skirmishes showed Chedd had advantages on boards 1,2 and 4, with parity on 3. The players showed the value of staying in the games as firstly David Lambton steadily got a foothold on board 2, against Chedd’s captain and highest rated player, who was on amazing run of 17 wins and 2 draws in 20 games this year. David is developing a habit of killing 100% league records and for the second week in a row demolished one, taking his own tally to 5.5pts from 6 games for the Bees in the process, with a superb counter-attack after appearing to be on the ropes.
On board 4, recent re-recruit Carmel Barwick was playing as a last minute reserve and was slowly activating her minor pieces for a King side attack. When the oportunity arose she sliced open the defences in front of the opposing King, with a co-ordinated rook, bishop and queen attack to put the underdogs 2-0 in the lead.
On board 1, David Hulme had generated some King side attack with advanced pawns despite being outplayed early on. For the second week running he got lucky, as his opponent blundered in time pressure leaving a rook open to a queen check fork and allowing David to make it an unbelievable 3-0 to the underdogs. Shortly afterwards we suffered a loss on time in the remaining game. This result means the B team have overtaken our “A” team to top the league table, with 8 pts from 6 matches, while all teams have games in hand in a wide open title race.
Internal Swiss Rapidplay underway.
On Wednesday, we started our 8 round Swiss Rapidplay event. With 41 members entering the competition the Events Officer was hoping for a new club record attendance. However there were a number of late requests for byes leaving just 25 players at the start. As is often the case, a new face appeared and was quickly integrated into club competition. Our new arrival, Richard Fish was paired with the Events officer – David Hulme – and proceeded to destroy him in a few minutes to claim the first win of the night. The 1st round results mainly went as expected, although there were a couple of repairings due to absences.
At the end of Round 2, we have only five players on 2pts all of whom are from the top seeds. These are Bart Fajfer, Martin Burns, defending champion Jarek Czyz, Rick Renegade and newcomer Richard Fish. With 3 players on 1.5 pts just behind the leaders, we then have 26 on one point mainly through the byes awarded. Full results can be seen from our “Internal Comps” tab on the home page of our website.
The next Rounds of the Rapidplay are due to be held on 14th December, but will be postponed if England are still involved in the World Cup on that night.
Before the Rapidplay Event commenced, Nigel Gardner made the presentation of trophies to the highest placed club members from our recent Congress held at The Mornflake Stadium, and announced the dates of our next congresses as 30th June to 2nd July for the longplay and September 17th for the Rapidplay.
Below are pictures of the presentations to Jarek Czyz and Karl Lockett, while Julian Hawthorne was absent. (to be added)
