Marple C V E Cheshire B 27/01/14

Here's the scorecard from last evening.

Marple C                     E Cheshire B   27/01/14  Stockport Lge. Div 2

1 P Kirby         1-0       T Rickards
2 G Trueman    1-0       P Bamford
3 N Livesey       0-1       N Flaherty
4 A Jenkins        1-0        A Stokes
5 C Baker         0-1        D Taylor
6 T Cowling      0-1        B Tait

                         3-3

Unfortunately Tony Kay was unable to play through illness and his place in the line up was taken by Terry. Some people may have thought this would be a relatively easy match but I was far from certain. Although they have few star players East  Cheshire do have the strength in depth to put out two competitive teams at Division two level. Here they had made every effort to put out their strongest possible team with Tudor Rickards making a rare excursion into the B team.

My game was the first to finish. I played an interesting and sharp variation against the Pirc, but one that I suspect is positionally dubious. Here it worked out very well for me as Paul soon lost material and resigned.
Returning from the post mortem my first view was of Nigel turning over his King. He had seemed to me to be doing well early on so something nasty must have happened.

On Board 4 , Andys opponent had sacrificed a piece for very little. Although the play was interesting Andy seemed always to be in control and he found a nice concluding sequence driving his opponents King to the eighth rank!

From an opening that seemed to transpose several times Paul outplayed Tudor and won a piece. Like Andy he was never in any trouble and although the game lasted a long time I was always sure he was going to win and this proved to be the case. This was an excellent result against an opponent who has been something of a bete noire  for both Paul and myself.

So at 3-1 things were looking promising but there was a sting in the tale. Terry had lost a piece and although he tried everything possible to gain some play there was nothing to be done against his opponents extremely accurate moves.

We now needed half a point to win the match. With the Black pieces Chris had made all the running in his game and White had what seemed a difficult IQP position with his Bishop on b2 glumly looking at his d4 pawn. When we looked at the position afterwards Chris did very little wrong but in one key line allowed a rather beautiful d5 line clearance idea. Incredibly the best Chris could do was reach a lost N+P's ending one pawn down. David was then remorseless in his play and eventually Chris had to resign. As Andy said to me last week  "Chess is a cruel and difficult game".

So the match finished 3-3, which means forthcoming matches particularly against East Cheshire A (10th Feb) and Stockport B (15 April) become even more crucial.

Thanks to all who played, particularly Terry for standing in at short notice.