The second Minor Knockout tussle of the week with Clevedon took place at the Fishponds Club.

We got off to a very good start thanks to James, who had one of those “Blink and you’ll miss it” games against Ben. Nothing much seemed to be happening but, the next time I looked, James was plonking his Queen down on h7 and it was all over!

None of the other games were anything like so far advanced but it looked like Dave was content to neutralize Stuart’s famed Polish Opening and they were soon back in the bar to enjoy going over the thrills and spills of their game.

I was probably next to finish and managed to overestimate my winning opportunities against Dave and then overlook some drawing ones. This left the match tied with three games to go.

Although I fancied Martin’s position against DPK, I was not so keen on either Alan’s or Jake’s games. I think they both went a pawn down early on, although there were plenty of possibilities to recover.

But Martin was the next to finish, when he forced an opposite coloured bishops ending where he was two pawns up. It was a textbook display of how to push home the advantage.

Jake had recovered to a level position against Michael after 30 moves. They each had two rooks, a knight and a handful of awkward pawns. Jake succeeded in trapping the enemy knight and then finishing off his opponent.

Alan managed to win back Jack’s passed pawn to reach an ending which looked drawish. He finally had an extra pawn with just one rook each and patiently kept probing for the whole point. Once the rooks came off he found a way to force his pawn home to give us a match result by a margin that had looked unlikely a quarter of an hour earlier.

So a victory by 4½-1½ saw the Knights through to a semi-final against Yate at the end of March.

Ian Pickup