Oxford 4NCL

All, these were our results from Round 9 just concluded.   

Games are available for perusal here.

Skip had overlooked that Ox1‘s tiny tiny chance of getting into the top two was zero: Wood Green Monarchs had the pleasure of a free pass tonight. Ho hum. Ox3‘s slim play-off chances went kaput as well with a loss to high-flying Hatch-End A. Now we’ll have to look cautiously over our shoulder and try to avoid relegation to Div 5. Tie-breaks will need to be calculated carefully by your skip when he sees the Round Nine tables.

The theme for the evening seemed to be pieces getting stuck. Happily oppo pieces, not Oxford pieces, curiously all getting stuck on their respective QN5 {b4 / b5 for modernists} (Arya, Nakul & Tashika’s oppo).

James returned to action with a bang, uncorking a beauty of a tactic to pick off Black’s offside queen. David must have been disappointed Black resigned when he did, for he had the most enormous position. Odd stat: all of our board 1s finished before any of our other boards by 20:30.

Move Of The Evening: Ian’s 44. … Rg3. Sadly in a losing cause, but what a move!

All, these were our results from Round 8 just concluded.  

Games are available here.

Ben enjoyed a snappy quick win when his oppo tried a cunning zwischenzug that stranded his knight. He was done by 20:10 but wasn’t first in the division to finish: elsewhere in the country, this accident happened:

1. e4 c6 2. d4 d5 3. e5 Bf5 4. h4 h6 5. g4 Bg6 6. h5 Bh7 7. e6 fxe6 8. Bd3 Bxd3 9. Qxd3 Nf6 10. f4 Na6 11. c3 Qc7 12. Nf3 O-O-O 13. Ne5 Rd6 14. Nd2 Rg8 15. g5 Ne8 16. Qh7 1-0

David dominated from around move 25 and it looked to your skip that his win was a matter of time. K cashed in his draw in a tricky R+P endgame to make sure. That’s four wins on the bounce for the firsts and we overtake Arkell’s Angels to move into fifth. Gonzaga A & Anglian Avengers are a point ahead, tied third.

Skip feels Ox2 were unfortunate: we could easily have won 3-1 with great positions on 2 & 3 going the other way. Ox3 didn’t really get off the ground, we were a bit outgraded and Ian’s early draw proved to keep us whitewash-free for the season.

Ox4 dropped into negative equity for most of the match (don’t ask) and it required Tashika’s defensive skills to pull the team back into the black. Just.

All, these were our results from Round 7 just concluded. 

Games are available here; I’m not sure many of you will want to look at them, it was rather a disastrous night. The fourths biit the dust hard, the tone for their match being set by Asif’s expensive misclick.

In Ox3, Chris scored a comfortable draw against his higher-rated oppo but that was the last of our joy until Kenneth salvaged a “lucky” draw (his description!). Nakul also rescued a draw in Ox2 after (skip thinks) something went awry in his French Tarrasch.

There was a moment skip thought we wouldn’t win even one game on the night until Arya found a mate and David persevered to win a long endgame thanks to his second passed d-pawn. Ox1 move to 6 points but are still 6th in the table, one point behind Arkell’s Angels.

What happens next?

Ox1, 2 and 3 have played all other teams in our groups. Rounds 8-10 are against one team from each of the other three groups. Attentive readers will remember that skip sent the full running order right at the beginning of the season and this is what’s left:

All these games count for group standings – 4NCL HQ describe this as “similar to NFL or NHL”.

All, these were our results from Round 6 just concluded. For the first time this season we achieved a clean sweep of wins. Our games have been gathered in here for your enjoyment, in board order as usual from top to bottom. 

Ox1‘s win puts daylight between us in 6th and Shropshire / Atticus A in 7th/8th of Group B, but we’re still 2 match points behind 5th-placed Gonzaga. Next up are Anglian Avengers 1 for whom Messrs Talsma & Lewis have a perfect record, 5/5 each.

Ox2 were flattered somewhat by the 3-1 scoreline. Andrejs scored an impressive win on top board but Sussex were pushing on all of the other boards. Chris & Sean put up the shutters successfully on 3 & 4 (skip thought Chris might have played a3 after move 38 in his K+P endgame purely for aesthetic reasons, not because it’s any good), while Edgar was the beneficiary of a huge time-trouble blunder by his oppo.

Ox3‘s win puts them well into the top-of-the-group-D mix on 7, joint-second with Downend 2 and (probably) Harrow 3 as I write.  It came down to Dimitrios’s game and his speculative “all-in” piece sac caused his opponent to go wrong.

“Normal” service was resumed in Ox4 as we posted our third 4-0 scoreline in four – this is good for our goal difference. Sam set the ball rolling super-quickly before your skip had settled in to viewing mode: “an example of what not to do in this opening on the Black side”, he says. Tashika won a strange endgame: at one point her K+B were stuck in the corner while all White’s pieces were active, but later White contrived to clump all his pieces in the corner as the bishop woke up in time to support her passed h-pawn.

All, these were our results from Round 5 just concluded:

It was a good night for the first team and a very good night for the thirds. The fourth team wangled a draw after  we suffered a no-show on one of the boards: the extra game-point penalty means that match finishes all-square, Wigston 2’s FOURTH draw of the season.

Our games have been gathered in here, in board order as usual from top to bottom. Some highlights / comments:

• Arya & Kenneth’s wins demonstrated in different ways the power of doubled rooks on the seventh.
• Arya’s seen the final position in K’s game earlier this season.
• Dimitrios won a worse K+P endgame (move 30) – skip thinks. Black seemed to be ahead in most races. Skip could be wrong, he hasn’t applied the engine to it. Did Black choose the wrong race? 
• Well done to Andrejs who survived a pre-game power cut to score a lengthy draw on a small screen in the dark.
• We’ll forgive Edgar missing mate in one late on, his position was sooo good and he was probably enjoying himself.

Talking of enjoyment, somewhere in deepest Yorkshire IM James Adair was likely disappointed that his game tonight ended at move 21 in a position with level material.