Thursday 5 October 2017

ECB 3 - 3 Altrincham A

The first match of the season saw us make a great late comeback to claim a draw, and extended our unbeaten run this season (!).  It was an emotional night at times and certainly tense and we even saw an illegal move.

It was wonderful to see Tudor back at the club and he got us off to a great start.  The Welsh wizard came up with some of his usual tactical magic to floor his opponent.

In my own game, I had chances early on to take a big advantage but decided to "play safe" instead which then meant I was on the defensive and eventually cracked.  Keven unleashed his pet opening and had attacking chances too but erred on the side of caution and had the better play and an extra pawn in in his draw.  Myles unfortunately dropped a piece on move 10 but played on and made it difficult before being edged out in a pawn endgame.

So were down 2.5 to 1.5 and needed something from the remaining 2 boards.  This looked very unlikely as David T was 2 pawns down in a same coloured B and R ending.  But his doggedability (spell check!) knows no bounds and he stuck in there and won back a pawn and went on to force an incredible draw.

This meant we needed a win from Steve T to draw the match.  He had been a pawn up for a while and, with 2 knights each, looked pretty secure once he had begun to make progress with his Qside pawn majority.  It then got complicated and Steve's time advantage started to ebb away and became a time scramble which was made worse when he suffered a 2 minute penalty.  However, he recovered and after some neat maneouvering his runaway a pawn won the day.

So some exciting stuff.  Let's hope that future matches will be a bit more straightforward....



1 – 0  Steve Tranter v Mark Hann (169)
½ - ½  Keven Holton v Reg Clucas (154)
0 – 1  Paul Bamford v Mark Whalley (142)
0 – 1  Myles Heywood v Sheraz Khalil (132)
½ - ½  David Taylor v Nick Lowe (124)
1 – 0  Tudor Rickards v Bill McCartney (122)
3 - 3

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