Wednesday night saw Crewe Chess Club play its first match against another club in proper Over The Board (OTB) conditions since the Covid outbreak in March 2020, as Fenton brought a five board team for a pre-season graded friendly.
The visitors had to contend with a couple of late player withdrawals, but thanks to their captain Steve Emmerton still managed to raise the team of five, but this conceded some grade advantage to the hosts.
Unfortunately for Steve he fell to an early blunder which allowed one of our debutants, David Lambton to notch up his first OTB success for the club. Julian Bulbeck soon added another point to our score with a win on board 5 before the visitors pulled one back on board 4. Lukasz Michalek seemed to have the upper hand on board 3 with Kings castled on opposite sides of the board, with his King having greater protection. The position became double edged but the clock ultimately proved the downfall for his opponent and match victory was secured. This left the board 1 game outstanding, as our other debutant Marin Burns was under severe pressure before a badly judged exchange sacrifice gave Martin the advantage. However it was not plain sailing as Martin was down to one minute on his clock against 27 minutes, but managed to tie up his opponent thanks to the 10 second increments, before forcing victory from a game which had looked pretty dire earlier in the evening. The final score was a flattering 4-1 success.
In other action at the club, there were 16 players involved in the internal Winter Tournaments. Full details are on the LMS. Additionally there were another 8 members involved in coaching sessions as chairman Dave Price led the sessions.
Next Wednesday (20th) there is another pre-season friendly as we host Holmes Chapel and on Thursday we take a small team to play Kidsgrove.
Before both of these we have our two 4NCL online teams playing on Tuesday night.
Details of OTB fixtures/results and 4NCL online fixtures/results can be seen from the tabs at the top of this page.