Somerset v Sussex

Our thanks to Jack Rudd for the following results and report.

Played at Basingstoke Bridge and Chess Club, Basingstoke on 15 May 2004. Somerset had white on the odd boards.

Games on boards 1 and 9 are annotated by Jack Rudd on the WECU page of the Games Section. 

Sometimes things just don’t go your way. You reschedule a match to avoid a clash with your county individual championships... and it turns out that two events on the rescheduled day nab your best players anyway. And so it was off to trawl through my list of reserves, a depressingly familiar occurrence near the end of this season.

I didn’t even know I would have a board 16 until the day of the match, and it wasn’t until after the match had started that I realized I didn’t have a board 13. The other Yeovil players were all there, but apparently Simon Gray had gone into hospital on the day of the match. May I take this opportunity to wish him well, and also to apologise to Richard Almond for his wasted journey. One-nil to Sussex.

The next two results also went Sussex’s way, prompting fears that we might beat Buckinghamshire’s record as the team most heavily defeated this season. Ed Prenton’s opponent easily demonstrated the gulf in class you would expect from a 100-point grading difference; winning a pawn and then going on to exploit the advantage in the ending. Then Feliks Kwiatkowski, renowned throughout the chess world for his low-level muttering and the high score you’d get for his name in Scrabble, smashed through with a kingside attack against Chris Purry’s Petroff.

The next few results put a more rosy glow on things. Bernard Cafferty, apparently the only man capable of activating Godwin’s Law without using the internet, made a miscalculation that would have allowed Andrew Footner to win a pawn with a tactic; Andrew unfortunately failed to see this, and agreed a draw soon afterwards. Then Mike Twyble’s game petered out into a draw by repetition. I, with my exquisite sense of timing, then played my best county game of the season – why couldn’t I have done it against Cornwall?

With the score 4-2 to Sussex, our opponents then turned in a few results to put the match beyond reach. Charlie Linford finished a rook ending with a neat tactic to force mate against Colin Winch, Roger Waters got his bishop locked on h8 in an English against Farr, and had to play most of the game effectively a piece down, and Graham Steer blundered in a promising position, letting his opponent deliver Smothered Mate. Then Adrian Ruston also lost; his experimental handling of the Exchange Queen’s Gambit proving unsuccessful.

Sussex then wrapped up the match with Steve Newman’s draw against Rob Eadie; Rob did well there to recover from a bad opening. Then Dave Wood put in the performance of his life to beat a much stronger opponent and take Somerset’s score to 3½.

That, sadly, was it for Somerset’s total. The ongoing debate about the Blackmar-Diemar Gambit rumbles on; Gerry Jepps managed to regain the pawn against Ken Norman, but had to endure horrible weaknesses to do so, and ended up losing. Then Roger Turner’s opponent converted an exchange-up position fairly easily.

Lucas Korvin had been struggling on in a losing position for a couple of hours, but eventually had to admit defeat as well; he can take credit for lasting so long against an opponent more than 100 grading points above him. Finally, Geoff Berryman looked to have been holding John Dodgson for a while, but perhaps things slipped away from him in the time-scramble. When the dust settled, it was his opponent who was queening a pawn, and Geoff resigned.

Congratulations to Sussex. May they have a closer tie against Greater Manchester.

Frome 2004 

Results  

Our thanks to Gerry Jepps for the following

The next WECU Easter Congress will be the 60th since its inauguration in 1946.  Although most of the archives are available we have been unable to compile a comprehensive table of all venues, winners etc.  If anyone can fill any of the blank spaces in the table below, we would be pleased to hear from you.