| Board | Rating | Bedford C | V | Luton C | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1765 | Shields, Callum TB | 0 – 1 | N D’Cruz, Damon | 1850 |
| 2 | 1706 | Potts, AlexanderB | ½ – ½ | G Mirza, Humayun | 1626 |
| 3 | 1562 | Grimditch, JamesG | 0 – 1 | B Montgomery, Peter | 1614 |
| 4 | 1295 | Dairi, MahmoudG | 0 – 1 | G Hayden, Tim | 1598 |
| 5 | 0821 | Dairi, DaniellaG | ½ – ½ | G Welton, Desmond S | 1270 |
| Total | 7149 | 1 – 4 | 7958 |
Luton C came knocking yesterday for an important winner-takes-all clash at the bottom of the table. For me personally it was good to see my regular team back after last week’s shenanigans – captaincy is a breeze in these circumstances!
James’s game was the first to finish, and frankly it looked like a bit of a wash. It looks like his opponent just completely blew him off the board from start to finish – we’ve all had games like that and it sucks to be on the wrong end of them.
My own game finished a bit prematurely. Into the middlegame I’d contrived to reach a closed position with only one open file on the board, and then give my opponent (the affable Humayun Mirza) exclusive control of that file. As a result I was forced into a series of unappetising moves, and in desperation I came up with a neat tactical idea to interfere with the open file. I looked at it for a while, figured it didn’t really work but gave my opponent plenty of room to blunder in response – a classic “?!” move. Having not seen anything I liked better, I played it anyway; Humayun then went into a long think, and to his credit he found the correct reply, emerging from the complications a pawn up. But then, unexpectedly, he offered me a draw a few moves later, which I naturally bit his hand off for. He explained to me afterwards that he’d been spooked by my surprising move a few turns before and was dreading what else I had in store for him. The answer was “not much!”
Daniella’s game was an odd one. She went a piece down pretty early on but played on, forcing her opponent to convert the advantage. Of course this meant a long game suffering on the ropes, but the knockout blow never came (I think her opponent may have missed a skewer towards the end?) With queen and knight against queen, and a few pawns each, her opponent just couldn’t find a way out of endless queen checks and a draw was agreed. A gutsy performance, to be sure.
I didn’t catch much of Mahmoud’s game, but by the time I caught up with him it was already down to just pawns, with his opponent having a passer but Mahmoud’s pawns further advanced and potentially able to bully their way through. Nonetheless, he lost the race to queen and that proved decisive. There may have been a sneaky stalemate towards the end that he missed, but he nevertheless acquitted himself well against a player who had about 200 rating points on him.
So that put the match out of reach, but there was still one more game in progress. Callum was the last to finish, though he did play on a long time in what seemed like a hopeless position. In the middlegame he was forced to sacrifice and exchange to deal with the threat caused by a far-advanced passed pawn, and thereafter it was really just a question of technique. Callum did his thing of laying eleventy zillion stalemate traps in the endgame, but they were all nimbly dodged and in the end he resigned with mate just a few moves away.
So in the end a fairly comprehensive defeat, but to be fair except on my own board I think we were outrated on all the others. And thanks to a good win for the D team on the same day, that confirms that the C team is finishing bottom of the heap for the second year running. Oh well, there’s always next season…
Alex Potts, 25th April 2025