Clouds

Played at East Cheshire Chess Club last evening -

East Cheshire A       V     Marple A   :Stockport Lge Div One: 25/11/2015

1 S Tranter             0-1      A Longson
2 J Reed               0.5/0.5   M Fernandez
3 P Ramsey          0.5/0.5   G Trueman
4 K Newell              0-1       P Kirby
5 D Newell           0.5/0.5    A Jenkins
6 D Taylor              0-1       A Hall

                              1.5/4.5

On a stormy evening Marple ventured to Cheadle Hulme for an encounter with East Cheshire. You could say the East Cheshire boards one and two had looked at life from both sides as they have both played with distinction for Marple in the Manchester League over the last eighteen months.I also knew boards three and four were very strong and even boards five and six were very experienced chess players.  In short this was probably the strongest line up East Cheshire could field. By contrast probably six highly graded Marple players who might have been able to play were  absent for a variety of reasons.I thought as I wrote out the matchcard that this was not going to be an easy victory and a defeat for us was certainly possible.
I'll try and write something about each individual game but I was putting so much effort into my game with Phil, which didn't finish until about 10.30, that  I saw little of the match as a whole, even on adjacent boards.
The first game to finish was Andys, although he was ahead on the clock if anything I preferred his opponents position when the peace treaty was signed so this was in my view a good solid start. (0.5/0.5)
Alan then beat David Taylor although I saw virtually nothing of the game apart from Alans passed Queenside pawn marching down the board to secure  the victory. Alan is a terrific recruit to our squad with what seems to be an encyclopedic knowledge of chess and I look forward to him scoring many more points for our teams over the coming months. (1.5/0.5).
Paul played a very nice game to beat Kieran, who, although he doesn't play a lot these days, is a high quality chess player. Kieran adopted a double fianchetto strategy. Theory tends to be a little sniffy about such things but I think its a very interesting way to play. After all it might be possible to set out your pawns to thwart one fianchettoed Bishop but how do you do it against two? In this encounter Paul played lovely positional chess to leave his opponent with serious structural weakness which I presume was eventually the decisive factor. (2.5/0.5)
Even by my standards I've had a lot of draws recently and my battle with Phil proved to be another one.I thought I had secured something of an advantage on the Queenside  but Phil kept finding defensive concepts that I hadn't really considered. A retreat of his Queens Knight to it's original square on move 21 took me totally by surprise. Try as I might my advantage, if it was there, slipped away and we reached a Q+R ending where I thought I might be slightly worse as my isolated b pawn was the only weakness on the board. By this point though we were both down to a few minutes and I was able to navigate my way to what was a clearly drawn R+4 V R+4 position. (3.0/1.0).
Both the top two board games were epic encounters. Steve played lovely chess against Alex who might if anything have been slightly worse at one point. Gradually though Alex enormous strength shone through and eventually Steve lost a Bishop for inadequate compensation and Alex, though very short of time, converted in his usual elegant fashion. (4.0/1.0).
The final game to finish was Michaels dual with John (Reed). From what I saw this game looked well balanced for most of its long length.As the players got down to the last couple of minutes I suspected Michael, with his youth and tremendous ability at blitz, would break through. However John did extremely well to keep finding very good moves very quickly and ultimately the players shook hands on a draw. (4.5/1.5).
So a good victory for Marple in a match where every one of our players made a significant contribution. As always many thanks to those who played/drove, especially Andy and Alan who stood in at very short notice.