A priceless victory

 After Castles, I was shortly off again to Wallington, where we hosted Kingston in the Alexander Cup. This is the Surrey League's main knockout competition, played over 10 boards and with a mandatory quickplay finish. Wallington seem to vascillate between strikeouts and home runs in this competition - the last time the club so much as won a match in it was as long ago as 2008, but on that occasion they reached the final (only to lose 10-0!)

 Things started brightly when we learnt that they were defaulting the bottom two boards, but as expected they were able to outgrade us on most of the boards being played: 204-193, 191-190, 163-189, 162-176, 149-175, 142-156, 132-160, 140-122, 140-Def, 138-Def. Amazingly, I not only predicted my pairing correctly but got white, and so was looking forward to using some preparation. My opponent, Nicholas Grey (175) was not so obliging, but no matter - a fairytale story began to unfold and I rose to the occasion:

 In the end, we won by the narrowest of margins: DDDLWLDDWW. Of our 10-board team, I was the only player to collect a full point over the board, but so be it. This is, I believe, my best ever result in a graded game, and what a time to produce it! I will not claim to have played the game masterfully well, but in the nasty, gritty world of 75-minute evening league chess, it is not always necessary to do so. I was outplayed for much of the middlegame, but took my chance when it was offered around the time control, and for once played the endgame that resulted almost faultlessly - as in the game at CCF a few weeks ago against Hernandez Castro, I demonstrated a hitherto unknown killer instinct.

 Last season my opponent scored a hugely impressive +20 =13 -2, so is clearly not an easy man to beat (oddly both of his losses came with white!) Even with the pressure of the entirety of both teams watching my game, and knowing the match rested on it, I held my nerve - one Wallington team-mate even said I looked extremely confident at the board! For someone who is invariably trying to frown the chessboard into submission, and always looks grumpy (several SGS team-mates used to say that they got nervous when I was looking at their games during matches, for they constantly felt they must be worse!) that was very surprising to hear. A dream parting gift to Wallington then, who now play either Wimbledon or CCF in the quarter-final. Either will be a challenging fixture, but with a start like this, who knows?

 Sadly, I am almost certainly not going to be around when it is played; I will however be back in Surrey at Christmas and should be able to play a match or two at that time. In the interim I shall be able to post about a few games - Bristol University have plenty of fixtures in the Bristol & District League, and I'm told that I can hope to be around the border of the two teams. I am also considering playing in the BUCA Individual Championship in November, but at the moment I don't really know what finances and time will permit - watch this space. I hope to keep up a reasonably coherent schedule of posts even if they aren't my games; perhaps some book reviews, other peoples' games (submissions always welcome!), another flashback game collection, or if times are bad even my dreaded spreadsheet data dumps...

 Until then, as the league season begins once more, may I be the first to wish all readers good luck with their chess!