League position after 4 rounds … (Oxford opponents to date are highlighted)

Team	Won	Drawn	Lost	Points
RICHMOND	4	0	0	8
OXFORD 1	3	0	1	6
WHITE ROSE	3	0	1	6
BARBICAN 4NCL 2	2	1	1	5
CAMBRIDGE UNIV. 1	2	1	1	5
GUILDFORD-ADC 3	1	2	1	4
WESSEX 1	1	2	1	4
HILSMARK KINGFISHER 2	2	0	2	4
SLOUGH SHARKS 2	1	1	2	3
POISONED PAWNS 1	0	2	2	2
WARWICKSHIRE SELECT 1	0	1	3	1
BARBICAN 4NCL YOUTH	0	0	4	0

Four rounds of the 4NCL have now been played in all leagues; for Divisions 1 - 3 inclusive, the first two meetings have been at Sunningdale (mid-September) and Coventry (November 10-11).

Since May things have changed in the top league: top club Wood Green no longer have their sponsor, leaving the way and league title open for Guildford ADC. With no competitors in sight, the prospect of end-of-season clashes such as happened last May - where Judith Polgar was their nominated woman player, and Wood Green's team with an average grade of 2670 (Adams, Polgar, Dreev, Sokolov, Smirin, Bologan, Nielsen, and McShane) could only draw against Guildford's average grade of 2617 (Fressinet, Harikrishna, Gurevich, Krasenkow, Lautier, Rowson, Sutovsky, and Ciuksyte) - are now, temporarily at least, a thing of the past.

So, top of Division 1 with 100% lie Guildford ADC1, runners-up last year on board count, and since their Round 4 average grading (2504) exceeded those of the opposition by 100 points / board (unless you count their second team, which averaged 2445), the destination of the title this year seems a foregone conclusion.

All of which counts as a pity, if you've got an eye on the spectacle - and being able to see top super-GMs counts as one in my book - but has the upside that promotion to the top level becomes not only more than a possibility for an averagely strong side, but allows players in the 2200 FIDE bracket a more extended opportunity to test their skills against players rated significantly higher than them. Accordingly, the absence of super-GM eye candy in the top echelons hasn't affected the appetite of Division 2 players to have their chance at the top table of UK chess.

Since May, Kieran has dipped into the transfer market and come up Michael White and Tom Eckersley Waites, both of them in the 2200 bracket as regards playing performance, and adding strength in depth to the mid-team board placings. We also welcomed back Merim to the team, giving a squad of about 12 players. The woman player this year is Lateefah Messam-Sparkes, and for the 2nd weekend Merim's friend Lejla Smajlovic guested in that role.

Round 3 - Coventry, 11 November 2006

		BARBICAN 4NCL 2		6½ - 1½	OXFORD 1
1	w	Rogers, Jonathan W	2353	1 - 0	Bilalic, Merim	2288
2	b	Berry, Neil	2312	½ - ½	Savage, Ben D	2335
3	w	Pritchett, Craig W	2289	1 - 0	Milovanovic, Aleksander	2272
4	b	Taylor, Martin R	2337	½ - ½	Ozeren, Kemal	2290
5	w	Eggleston, David J	2239	1 - 0	Smallbone, Kieran	2228
6	b	Twyble, Michael S	2215	1 - 0	White, Michael J R	2246
7	w	Taylor, Peter	2211	1 - 0	Eckersley-Waites, Tom	2141
8	b	Bhatia, Kanwal K	2062	½ - ½	Smajlovic, Lejla	2047

Making it to Coventry is fairly easy; finding the city centre, quite another thing; the city centre having been redesigned after the (nazi) Blitz, the familiar signposts of the city (railway station, hotels, bus.) don't seem to point anywhere central. It must be a challenge to work in their tourist offices, as directions are hard to understand! In the end I found (a) the cathedral (both new and old are sandwiched together) and then (b) Kieran Smallbone. The latter discovery helped us to find a coffee and get lost together.

The venue was quite plush in some ways - plenty of table space and cloths - although the lighting was a bit (only marginally so) on the dull side. Round 3 was a bit of a disaster for Oxford 1, and although in the end we could have no complaints about the result, we weren't helped by the fire alarm that happened after about 3.5 hours play.

fire, anyone?!

What happens when the fire alarm goes off? … is an interesting question: at work, we have a test fire alarm every Wednesday morning at 8.30am , it is generally ignored by staff. And, having adopted this habit, staff have tended to ignore any alarms heard outside that period for much the same amount of time. Here, at Coventry , the chess players tended to do the same, with some gazing around blankly, wondering what if anything needed doing, while others seemed simply oblivious to the sound - or at any rate its possible import.

So, by the time the organisers had gotten the idea that something needed to be done, and orderly queue had been formed to get out of the venue, it was clear that if it were the real thing, even advanced GMs were lacking the simple technique of evacuating the premises; most were registering about 1700 BCF on the fire prevention scale. And of course, we may have been sent to Coventry but we were still in England , the orderly queue didn't seem to be going anywhere very quickly, so eventually the wiser and older amongst us simply sat down. It was during one of these senior moments that I realised that the large windows leading to the first-floor balcony provided an adequate contingency plan in case it was needed. No offence to the venue, or my fellow chess colleagues, but had there been a fire, it would have been more than our gooses that would have been cooked - crispy fried GM the house speciality.

Order was eventually restored, and the rank and file returned, many of them by adopting the simple expedient of turning around in the queue and walking in the other direction. Once the clocks were running again, some of the Oxford contingent didn't do as well as they might have done. Lejla on board 8 managed to get involved in a blitz shootout in her opponent's time trouble and dropped a rook; Kieran returned to find he still had to make about 5 moves in fifteen seconds, but his concentration was sufficiently disturbed not to make the drop; and Ben's opponent was gifted some extra thinking time - quite annoying given that the Savage grinding machine is specifically designed to constrict time available to make plans.

At the same time, neither Michael (White) nor Merim were doing well enough to be helped by the confusion and losses resulted. Slim hopes of a drawn were receding, after Martin Taylor managed to escape the bind that Kemal was imposing on the position leaving our man some work to do to retrieve the half point, and the final indignity was Alex's loss after some great play against Craig Pritchett.

Round 3 - 12 November 2006

		OXFORD 1		5½ - 2½	SLOUGH SHARKS 2
1	w	Savage, Ben D	2335	½ - ½	Rees, Ioan	2227
2	b	Ozeren, Kemal	2290	1 - 0	Martyn, Rafe	2288
3	w	Bilalic, Merim	2288	1 - 0	Williams, Samuel G	2245
4	b	Smallbone, Kieran	2228	1 - 0	Kahar, Krunal	2220
5	w	Milovanovic, Aleksander	2272	0 - 1	Schneider, Veronika	2221
6	b	White, Michael J R	2246	1 - 0	Roberson, Peter T	2187
7	w	Eckersley-Waites, Tom	2141	1 - 0	Muter, Donny	2146
8	b	Smajlovic, Lejla	2047	0 - 1	Kafka, Graeme	2136

Revived by a decent Chinese meal the night before, the lads done better today, Brian, against a side not much different in strength.

• Ben on top board seemed to be heading for a win in the usual fashion, but his opponent wriggled long enough to induce an error, and in the end he needed to play accurately to draw;
• Kemal on board 2 produced a blinding early endgame spell to wrap up the point in about 5 moves, while
• Merim seemed at times to playing with his opponent's time trouble, as he toyed with certain concepts in the closed Sicilian. (I know they are concepts because I blundered into a detailed discussion on them between Merim and Matt Ludbrook while spearing some chow mein the night before.) Let's have a look:

This put the lads at +2, but two losses were being stored up for Lejla and Alex, both of them probably suffering from producing a mere ½ point from their excellent efforts the previous day. (Lejla's opponent, Kanwal Bhatia, picture below (right) kindly offered a draw after the rook blunder on the Saturday.) So it was all square with just three games left.

The final two games of the round both brought wins in convincing style:

But game of the day goes to Kieran for the following effort:

Seani

Ben, on Saturday, against Neil Berry

Kemal, on Sunday, against Rafe Martyn

Kieran, on Sunday, against Krunal Kahar