| Home Team: Bedford D | Away Team: Bedford C | ||||||
| Board | Name | Grade | Score | Score | Name | Grade | |
| 1 | Qais Karimi | 140 | 0 | 1 | Giuseppe Valerio | 154 | |
| 2 | John J Harbour | 138 | 0 | 1 | Peter S Gill | 134 | |
| 3 | Callum T Shields | 130e | 1 | 0 | Richard McMorran | 130E | |
| 4 | Anthony P Lawrence | 59 | 0 | 1 | Robert S Walker | 117 | |
| 5 | R David Cox | 30 | 0 | 1 | Nigel B Walker | 86 | |
| 1 | 4 | ||||||
| Played: 25/01/2018 | |||||||
Bedford D and Bedford C faced each other for the second time this season, both picking from reduced squads. In fact not really picking at all since we were more or less down to the last 10 players without calling on the superstars from the A and B teams. With Nigel Staddon and Mac McKenzie unwell, and Diego Merino finding it hard to make Thursday nights I had only one spare player, Tony Lawrence, and he was snapped up by John for his missing board 4.
First to finish was the game between Tony and Robert Walker. With both f2 and b2 threatened Tony chose to defend b2 only to succumb to a vicious invasion by Robert’s Queen and then Knight via f2.
I’m afraid I was too preoccupied with my own position to see much of what happened elsewhere. Nigel Walker, so far unbeaten, gained a material advantage and then held off David’s various threats to chalk up another win. Richard, next door to me, seemed to be fine but Callum managed to win a piece and Richard’s position rapidly fell apart. Joe arrived to find about 15 minutes gone on his clock and miraculously beat Qais who is rarely short of time and as we all know far stronger than his grade suggests!
My game against opposing Captain John was the last to finish. Up to move 35 it was quite a highbrow struggle which centred around John’s getting his Knight to d5. Having achieved that he had a won game but promptly left a Knight en prise, unnoticed by either of us. From then on almost every move was bad. Old codger and trainee old codger, long past their sensible bed-times, slugged it out with blunder after blunder. By pure luck I ended up with an easily won King and pawn ending which was more or less blunder proof.
So another good result which puts the C Team hot on the heels of Northampton in second place in Division 2 – no danger of promotion though (!!) as they have a game in hand.