Our last week at the Adelaide saw four matches: three wins and one defeat.

We had two home matches, both in the Surrey ‘novelty’ leagues.

Our Ellery Williams team took on Wimbledon. scoring an impressive win.

Well done to everyone, and a warm welcome to Advik, successful in his first of what I’m sure will be many games for us.

Our Fred Manning Trophy faced Surbiton: the result was a mirror image of this.

Thanks to all for playing.

At the Twickenham Club, our Thames Valley D team entertained Ealing D,

A solid performance, with excellent wins from Alex and Dan.

The most important match of the week was our TVB team’s visit to Surbiton B. Although we’re almost at the end of the season, both promotion and relegation were both possible in what is a very tight division.

We were relieved to see that our opponents weren’t at full strength: we outrated them on five of the six boards. Our hopes were fulfilled like this:

Polina quickly reached a minor piece ending which was agreed drawn. Jon, playing the Dutch Defence, attacked like Tal, crushing his opponent who had left most of pieces on the wrong side of the board. I was, as always with Black, worse from the opening, but Graham didn’t press things too much and I was happy to accept his draw offer: my first draw, and my first non-loss with Black of the season. Bertie went down in a bishop ending where his weakened pawns proved fatal: a nice win by his opponent leaving the score 2-2. We were doing better in the last two games: James (welcome to the team!) won a pawn, but his opponent managed to eliminate the queenside pawns, leaving him, in the second bishop ending of the night, with BPP v BP. It should have been drawn, but, like Carlsen, he kept on probing and eventually managed to swindle his way to victory. Victor played a beautiful positional game in the style of Petrosian, using his better bishop and pawn formation to reach a winning rook ending, which soon became an even more winning pawn ending.

Thanks to all who played, and also to Adrian, who came along as a reserve.

This result, along with Wimbledon A beating Maidenhead B on Monday, clarifies the situation at the top of the league.

All we need to do now is win our last two matches to gain promotion: away to Maidenhead B on 27 April and home to Wimbledon B on 7 May.

Thanks again to all our players, and to our match captains this week.