Know the classics!

 The penultimate round of the BUCA Championship was on Sunday morning, after a generally uninteresting AGM (although I did manage to get a proposal passed allowing teams to vary board order by up to 10 grading points... the one dissenting vote was from Bristol!) but also, more obviously, after Saturday night. As you may or may not know, I am a teetotaler, and in the company of many students, I was quietly hoping that this would give me an advantage for this round! Perhaps that sounds ridiculous, but the entire Newcastle team was late when playing our third team, and the 145-grade board 2 for University College London, the team we were playing, definitely looked the worse for wear. Sure enough, we were white in 1. Nf3 c5 2. c4 Nc6 3. d4 e6?! 4. d5 d6?? 5. dxc6, and a win in 15 more moves.

 For me it was not quite as straightforward as that, and I didn't really know what to expect. I was playing Bill Park. For the event his grade was listed as 96, but a brief search of the grading database reveals that this was based on 5 games last year (the 2011-12 BUCA Championship, of course!), whereas he has a published rapid grade of 152. It's hard to judge in light of this game; the reader is invited to reach their own conclusion.

 Here I got vindication of my investigations into chess history, and more generally putting some work into the game, by springing an opening trap in much the same way as its better-known practitioner:

 We returned to form after the wobble against Bristol 2 with a clean 3-1 win (WWLW; the loss came from pushing too hard in a drawish position.) The grades, 187-e150, 180-145, 168-126, 162-"96", suggested it should be pretty straightforward, but then again they did in the previous match!

 Clearly then, for a student of history this was a good 'propaganda' victory; I doubt this trap would be anywhere near as well-known if not for the fact that it was Fischer who brought it to prominence. Certainly it's the only way I came to know of it, and it seems that Park was in a similar position to Reshevsky - he just didn't have any idea of it, played a natural looking harassment move ...Na5? and paid the price, in spite of fierce resistance. Still, back in 1958 it wasn't well known beyond Soviet chess periodicals - in 2013 it is! After winning the Queen it was pretty plain sailing, although I always worry and dither in such positions and so for a little time I was still pensive. In the end though, the material difference made black's defence impossible.

  In the matches above us, LSE managed to rescue a draw against Edinburgh, and Warwick inexplicably failed to polish off Imperial from a dominating match position, and so with 6 match points from 8 we were only one off the latter two teams, who held the joint lead. We felt our final-round pairing with Imperial would give us chances...