Tuesday 8th April 2025, MW 12/14
| Richmond & Twickenham B | Ealing B | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 (b) | Alastair Armstrong | 2028 | 1-0 | Xavier Cowan | 1891 |
| 2 (w) | Raghu Kamath | 1926 | 1-0 | Simon Healeas | 1830 |
| 3 (b) | Bertrand Barlow | 1840 | 0.5-0.5 | Daniel Jennings | 1612 |
| 4 (w) | Simon Illsley | 1677 | 1-0 | Guiseppe Joe Ramundo | 1548 |
| 5 (b) | Polina Popovtseva | 1675 | 1-0 | Aleksei Gorbonosov | 1418P |
| 6 (w) | Adrian Waldock | 1654 | 1-0 | Aleksei Garifov | 1261P |
| 5.5-0.5 |
A very tough outing for us was represented in the scoreline as we were beaten by the much stronger team- they gained revenge on us for our sneaky victory just before Christmas. The only thing I can take from this is that I ticked off some items on the captain’s bucket list: field 2 Aleksei’s (bonus points for adjacent boards) and field 3 software engineers (bonus points again for adjacent boards).
Daniel finished first and unknowingly prevented a whitewash by agreeing a draw in a locked position. Mr Barlow tried some positional manoeuvring but was unsuccessful and settled for the draw.
I finished next and unusually early for me. I don’t win quickly and I don’t like to agree draws before the 20th move, so that only means one thing. My opponent had enjoyed a good season and a large rating increase- sadly, I offered little resistance to his upward curve after making a ‘touch piece, move piece’ blunder. I saw a nasty discovered check tactic immediately after touching my knight that, after moving to any available square, would now allow it. With gritted teeth I had to move it and was cleaned up inside the next 15 move due to the material loss.
Aleksei has been in the deep end this season with the strength of the bottom boards in Division 2 unrelenting. A kingside attack was deployed against his king and the h6 pawn in particular. That target was destroyed and Aleksei’s king was too exposed to hide from the mating threats. Quite often I find that defending the kingside is made easier by holding back the h g and f pawns for as long as possible. A pawn on h6 in my experience can become an extremely easy target.
Simon lost out to a queen skewer in a Q and P endgame but was fighting an uphill battle anyway with 2 pawns less.
Debutant Mr Gorbonosov enjoyed a solid start and was developing an interesting kingside attack, but then defected to moving his forces over to the queenside to stop his opponents inroads there. It wasn’t enough however and she broke through, eventually winning with a rook skewer.
Joe had the most intriguing game of the night with the very imbalanced position of his kingside castle setup vs white’s queenside castle. In foggy conditions, tactics were missed and the game slipped away from Joe much to his frustration. Subsequent analysis afterwards showed that a line he looked at in detail (but did not play- arghhh) was in fact winning.
We move onwards now to our final away match of the season where we are for once the favourites this time.