Toby Cox, former club and county champion, has once again agreed to judge the Game of the Season competition. Many thanks to him. Toby was given a shortlist of a dozen games chosen from the full selection which may be found here. He lists his selections and reasoning which is very interesting:-
- Special mentions to game 34 for an exciting open game before it slightly fizzled out towards the endgame, and (of course) game 2 for bringing the black king to d3 by move 18. Thank you to everyone that spent the time to annotate their games; it adds another dimension to looking through all the games.
- 3rd: Game 36 – there were a few games that only lasted around 20 moves this year, and this was my favourite of the lot. A very unorthodox opening led to a sharp position where both players needed to be accurate while they tried to develop. Unfortunately, white was not accurate enough. Black was ruthless with the execution.
- 2nd: Game 26 – It would haunt me for years if I lost this game as white. At least it was due to some very resourceful tactics from black. A very interesting game on the whole, with both kings feeling very exposed as early as move 20, and intense scrutiny on the black king for quite a while.
- 1st: Game 29 – amazing queen sac (even if black is very self-critical in the annotations). From there it was an exciting race to promote straight into an exciting race to checkmate using the new queens.