| Marple | Stockport | ||||
| 1 | Daniel Fernandez | 1.0 | 0.0 | Joe McPhillips | |
| 2 | Alex Longson | 0.5 | 0.5 | Jeff Horner | |
| 3 | Michael Fernandez | 0.5 | 0.5 | Nathan Taylor | |
| 4 | Sarah Hegarty | 1.0 | 0.0 | Harry Lamb | |
| 5 | Glenn Trueman | 0.5 | 0.5 | Allan Gardner | |
| 6 | Iaoannis Lentzos | 1.0 | 0.0 | S Dohery | |
| 7 | Paul Kirby | 0.0 | 1.0 | Adam Tyton | |
| 4.5 | 2.5 |
A great result which for me justifies our decision to enter the Manchester League. Bolton are a very strong club with a lot of depth but we thoroughly deserved our win.
Michael was better out of the opening (Sicilian) and won a pawn though black had some comp. Michael later missed a tactic that led into a nasty looking double rook ending. Bizarrely though Nathan offered a draw just as it looked as though white might be in some significant trouble.
Daniel was able to beat Joe after a Joe blundered an exchange in a drawn looking ending. Until then it seemed a correct game from a Queens Indian Defence. Joe is a very talented junior (211) and has even drawn a proper game against Nigel Short.
Sarah played a very controlled game against Harry Lamb. The game started as a Kings Indian Attack (KIA) but soon resembled a Catalan. Harry misplayed the position and had to work hard to win back his "gambited" pawn on c4. Sarah was able to extract the bishop pair for this though with a small edge. Some inaccuracies from white allowed Sarah to finish the game convincingly with some nice tactical touches.
Glenn's game was a draw which suited us just fine given the match situation. Position looked like a good Benoni for white.
The key game was probably Ioannis on board 6. Ioannis looked under serious pressure for most of this game but managed to escape to an ending where he had 2 pawns for a knight. (plus rook and two pawns each on the kingside). These pawns were connected though so I'm not even sure black should be worse in that position. Ioannis was able to simply keep pushing the pawns and even won the game. This was a great turnaround from a game I had written off as a probable loss at one point. By now we had reached 4 points and had won the match.
Paul lost against the experienced Tyton. As white Paul seemed to have a slightly passive position out of the opening and then, in his own words, blundered a pawn. I didn't see the rest of the game.
For my part I had an interesting game against North West 'Legend' IM Jeff Horner. Until his semi-retirement from the game Jeff was probably the strongest player in the North West (at least until the emergence of Stephen Gordon) and used to win Opens for fun. I've played Jeff a few times and it's normally an interesting tussle. Jeff is well known for steering games into 'his' kind of positions. with white this means the 'Slow Spanish' (or Ruy Lopez) structures against 1...e5 and also 1...c5. Our game opened 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 d6 3.c3 Nf6 4.h3 Nbd7 5.Bd3 b6 6.0-0 Bb7 7.Re1 Qc7 8.Bc2 Rc8! which I've used successfully before as black. I got a nice position out of the opening temporarily sacrificing a pawn for active pieces and initiative in the centre. It was a complicated middlegame but by the time control it looked like I had a winning game. Jeff gave up an exchange to reach an endgame that seemed trivial at first but transpired to be quite tricky due to my vulnerable king (I had Q, R and 5 pawns vs Q, B and 4 pawns). With about a minute left each at the end I'd stumbled into a perpeptual check and had to accept a draw (or risk getting beat).
So an a personal level a disappointing finish to the evening but I was thrilled with the team performance.
Many congratulations everyone!
Alex
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