On board 1 with the black pieces we had the D Team Captain, Dan Parcell making a guest appearance for Team E. In his own words: “I played the Scandinavian Defence and 10 moves in felt like I got what I wanted by damaging my opponent’s pawn structure, having a well-advanced e pawn. I had several opportunities to castle either side but pushed too hastily instead and left my King horribly exposed. I missed a simple tactic on move 14 and rushed my response - again castling either way was fine and would’ve led to a great game - but after the tactical misstep I resigned, choosing that over grinding through in a horrible position and hoping for blunders”.
I (Greg) was on board 2 with the white pieces against Ben Radford. I played a variation of the London Jobava opening that I’d learned from one of the Ginger GM’s videos. It was all going quite well up until move 23 when I thought that trading off queens would simplify matters but actually I just weakened my position. Eventually I was 2 pawns down and my opponent was able to promote a pawn and win the game.
On board 3 with the black pieces we had Hector taking on an opponent rated 300 points higher than him. Hector played an excellent attacking game and found some great tactics to secure our only win of the evening.
Charlie was on board 4 with the white pieces. He says: “The game was equal for most of the time, but my opponent was using much more time than me, so he finished on ~1:30 while I was at ~25 minutes. He beat me by promoting a pawn to a queen then checkmating me.”
On board 5 with the black pieces we had Vivaan. The game was fairly even until move 14 when Vivaan played b6 instead Nb6. From hereon, the game gradually slipped away from him.
Danny was on board 6 with the white pieces. He says: “I was playing white on board 6 against Andrew Corbally who it turns out is a very strongly rated opponent. He told me afterwards that he had an online bullet rating of 2000 previously. I wanted to open with the King's Indian attack but failed to complete that opening as I missed several opportunities to castle kingside early in the game. He then prevented that by placing his light Bishop on h3 and supported by Qd7. He opened with a black mustang defence. According to the chess engine Andrew had 91.8 accuracy recording 0 mistakes and only 2 inaccuracies. In comparison I only had 72.2% with 3 mistakes and 4 inaccuracies.”
So Hector’s was our only point in a 5-1 defeat and very well done to him!