Triple Match Night - A&B Team Results

Last night we had 3 matches at the club.  Here are the match cards for the A & B team matches

Marple A v East Cheshire (Charnley Cup)

 

		Marple A			East Cheshire
1		Alex Longson	1	0	P Ramsey
2		John Bentley	0.5	0.5	J Reed
3		Alan Walton	0.5	0.5	D Newell
4		Nigel Livesey	0.5	0.5	K Holton
5		Sean Hewitt	0	1	P Bamford
6		Andy Jenkins	1	0	K Flaherty
			3.5	2.5

 

Marple B v Holmes Chapel

 

		Marple B			Holmes Chapel
1		Andrew Horton	1	0	P Bennett
2		Sarah Hegarty	1	0	J Turner
3		Glenn Trueman	0.5	0.5	A Raeburn
4		Paul Kirby	0	1	B Scattergood
5		Tony Kay	0	1	I Bates
6		Terry Cowling	1	0	C Gay
			3.5	2.5

With a few players missing (Daniel, Michael, Ioannis, Jamie) I decided to take a risk and balance the sides so we would have a chance of winning both matches - this of course meant increasing the risk that the A Team would suffer an upset and drop out of the cup.

Both matches were very dramatic and went down to the last game.  In the A Team match Andy won a nice game early on to put us in a nice position, but unfortunately Sean's kingside attack came to nothing and his opponent won an exchange before finishing the game with a nice queen sac.

A couple of draws followed which left just me and John playing with the scores tied at 2-2.  John had sacked an exchange for a pawn and some dark square play in a Benko.  It looked a bit murky to me and his opponent wasn't making any obvious errors.  Getting low on time John allowed a repetition.

So I was last to finish and I needed to win or else we would lose the match on bottom board elimination.  Despite a some slightly dubious early middlegame play I'd managed to steer the game to a highly favourable endgame for me - and with an advantage on the clock I was highly confident of converting which I was able to do. 

The B Team match was even more dramatic.  By the time I had finished the scores were tied at 2.5 -  2.5 with just Andy's game remaining.  He was on the wrong side of a 3v2 rook endgame (all pawns on the kingside) and both players were down to a minute playing on their 10 second increments.  Pat decided to go for broke and gave back his extra pawn to try and activate his king and promote his h-pawn.  What he had underestimated was that Andy's e-pawn was now the more dangerous.  The game simplified into rook + f-pawn (Andy) v rook.  The position was a theoretical draw but it became clear that Pat was unaware of the correct drawing methods (Philidor's 3rd rank defence being the simplest) and Andy managed to bring home to victory in fine style!

These two wins were hard fought and mean that the A-Team have a cup final to look forward and the B Team now have 9 points and are very close to being mathematically certain of avoiding relegation.

Thanks all for playing.

Alex