Our league programme concluded this week with matches for our Thames Valley A and E teams.

Our A team were facing Kingston A on 20 May, who needed a result to overtake Hammersmith and take the title, so it was no surprise that they fielded a strong team. Here’s what happened.

Captain Maks reports:

As expected with Kingston needing at least a draw to win Division 1, they fielded their best team possible. Originally they also had a very strong player on board 3 Silverio Abasolo, but he couldn’t make it so John Foley substituted him. This led to our boards 3-6 being heavily outrated, although we did manage to get some surprise results.

On the top two boards, Gavin with white was playing a Trompowski against David Maycock. Gavin accrued quite a time advantage of 20-30 minutes in the first 10 moves and it appeared to be quite a fresh position. Gavin with an isolated e pawn vs Maycock’s isolated d pawn. Gavin was briefly a pawn up but lost it back with a desperado sacrifice on f2. 

Mike on board 2 was playing a Mexican defence that drifted into something that looked a bit like a Catalan. His opponent had some annoying pressure on the light-square-long diagonal. Unfortunately, both these games drifted into losing positions for our side.

Our middle two boards also looked quite equal initially. Bertie on board 4 played a d6 opening system defense with a queen trade, something like d4 d6, e4 e5, dxe5 dxe5, Qxd8+ etc. It’s a very respectable system for black: unfortunately, his opponent likes long and drawn-out queenless games and appears to be very good at them! Bertie also lost. John B on board 3 against John F, played e4, and was offered a draw at some point. He played on and was eventually a pawn up in a rook ending. It looked like a very interesting ending, with probably a few inaccuracies, but he converted it nicely winning a second pawn and handling the time pressure well.

Our last two games were my own game on board 5 and Alastair’s on board 6. In my own game, my opponent, a strong junior player,  played a queen’s gambit declined with 3… Be7 . Initially, I thought I was better with a strong bind on e5 and pushing c5 with tempo, but he managed to open the b-file with some annoying piece pressure. Unfortunately, I missed a combination where he could win a pawn with better pieces, and so also lost.

Alastair’s game was quite interesting, with Alastair playing a Czech Pirc system. It ended up Alastair with a superior knight to a bishop but in a pawn-down ending. There was no way for his opponent to win, however, he went into a long think with only 5 minutes remaining on his clock. He simply forgot to check his clock again and then lost on time!

So great results for John and Alastair & congratulations to Kingston for winning the league.

That leaves the final league table looking like this.

Maks again:

With the 6 other teams in the league, we managed to beat both the bottom two teams 2-0 and get at least 1 draw against each other team except for Ealing who came 3rd. I think this was really the difference maker in why Ealing beat us to 3rd place, even though their board difference score was not much better than ours.

Best performers:
Gavin 6 wins 4 draws 1 loss
Maxim 4 wins 1 draw 1 loss
Ashley: 2 wins, 2 draws
Alastair: 2 wins, 0 losses

Thanks to Maks for captaining the team this season, and to all our players. I’ll write more later.

Our TVE team finished with a home match against Kingston on 21 May which resulted in a narrow defeat: three draws and one loss.

Division X is a less informal division designed for lower rated players and those new to competitive chess, where the games are more important than the result. Here’s how it ended up this season.

(You’ll see that it doesn’t quite add up: it appears that Staines B and Ealing D only played once, the missing match being declared a win for Ealing and unplayed for Staines. You’ll also see that, while the other teams were pretty evenly matched, Maidenhead C were a lot stronger.)

Again, thanks to all who played for Richmond E during the season, and to Ken (who, I believe, is making a slow but steady recovery from his stroke) and Laurie for captaining the team.