A couple of club games

February 22, Berlin

I have come to Berlin for a few days to celebrate my birthday, if that's the word. I am sitting in a cafe as I write this. Its full of people working on laptops.

Since the Kidlington tournament, I've had a couple of interesting league nights, both at Huddersfield.

Two weeks ago there was an Rapid League evening, where you play 2 games in the evening, 25 mins each. I lost in my first game, playing the White side of a Benko. My second game saw my fastest-ever victory, in any form of chess including casual drunk games against Colin and 5-minute internet blitz. The game went like this:

1 d4 f5
2 Bg5 h6
3 Bh4 b6
4 e3 Bb7??
5 Qh5+
1-0

Even more amazingly this was against a strong club player, rated 139. It's a trap line in the Hopton Dutch which I have known for a while, but quite a surprise that he over-looked it. Just one of those things I suppose. He was a bit embarrassed about it, not suprising really. Still, he was a nice bloke and greeted me in a friendly manner the following week.

Last week I was back at Huddersfield again for a long-play league match against Huddersfield. As always, my team Netherton 'B' was heavily outgraded on every board. I was playing a young bloke rated 128. He said it was only his second season of serious chess. That certainly put my rating into perspective - still only 99 in my 8th season of club chess!

He didn't play all that well, and made a bit of a tangle of the opening. It was a Benko-type opening, until he did strange things like a3 and Ra2. His King got opened up after he took a Bishop on f3 with his g-pawn for some reason. All my pieces were on the Q-side as normal in a Benko so it was hard to capitalise on that. I think I got too hung up looking for a way to exploit his open King position, and stopped pressing on the Q-side which should have been my plan. The game got to the rather stiff time-control (35 moves in 70 mins) still level, and we both made mistakes in time trouble. I made more than he did and got into trouble, but I managed to find a good exchange sacrifice to hold the draw.

A final bit of chess news is that I went to spend an evening at Morgan Daniels' place in Bow, East London. His house is a bit of a tip - typical student house I suppose - but he made a superb curry (Daniels' famous Saturday night curry that he does every week), and then beat me and his friend Abdul at "knock-down blitz" - he even managed to beat me when it got down to him having 1 minute against my 5. Ive played a lot of players of around his rating lately at Kidlington and other places, but he's clearly much stronger than they are. Indeed his performance this season is apparently more like 170 than his current 139.

I met him again on Saturday when I was in LOndon getting ready for my Berlin trip. He was playing in a county game for Surrey v Essex U-140, and by chance I was in Coulsdon, where the game was being played, because it's very close to my parents' house. The match is played in a rather strange methodist Church which is used for a lot of chess events and has more chess gubbins in it than religious paraphenalia. Sadly, Morgan lost his game - rather over-pressed, I felt.

I will be seeing him, Dave Stephenson and Russell Goodfellow for the Doncaster congress next weekend which will be my next post.