2021 British Championship, Round 2

Round 2 saw the first heavyweight clashes of the tournament, and Danny Gormally put forward a strong statement of intent by beating Eggleston with black to move on to 2/2. He is joined on the top score by Mark Hebden, who was made to work very hard by 10-year-old Scottish junior Freddie Gordon.

There are six people in the score-group behind them, and it was no great surprise to see McPhillips and Ledger reach 1½ by drawing with each other, nor Arkell and Harvey join them by beating significantly lower-rated opponents. Perhaps more surprising were the performances of Neil Bradbury, who successfully defended a pawn-down ending against top seed Nick Pert, and Peter Finn, who achieved the first giant-killing of the tournament by beating Phil Brooks, rated 232 points above him.

A sensation seemed to have happened very early on in this round, as the bottom-board game between Mehrafarin and Starley appeared to have gone 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bf4 d6 3.e3 1-0. I had jokingly suggested on social media that Starley had resigned rather than face the prospect of having to play against the London System; the more mundane explanation turned out to be that a rogue result had crept onto the live board software.


Board No. Name Rtg Pts. Result Pts. Name Rtg No.
1 7 IM Eggleston David   J 2356 1 0 - 1 1 GM Gormally Daniel   W 2480 2
2 21 Gordon Frederick 1523 1 0 - 1 1 GM Hebden Mark L 2455 4
3 5 IM Mcphillips   Joseph 2425 1 ½ - ½ 1 IM Ledger Andrew J 2329 8
4 1 GM Pert Nicholas 2548 ½ ½ - ½ 1 IM Bradbury Neil H 2265 10
5 3 FM Harvey Marcus R 2465 ½ 1 - 0 ½ Khoury Theo 1814 19
6 22 AFM Latypova Olga L 1266 ½ 0 - 1 ½ GM Arkell Keith C 2380 6
7 9 FM Olson Hamish 2273 ½ ½ - ½ ½ WFM Sucikova   Svetlana 2175 13
8 16 Finn Peter 1959 ½ 1 - 0 ½ Brooks Phil J 2191 11
9 12 FM Webb Laurence E 2184 0 1 - 0 0 Willison Steven 1936 17
10 14 WFM Head Louise 2090 0 1 - 0 0 Stubbs Oliver 1925 18
11 20 Mehrafarin   Amirabbas 1734 0 0 - 1 0 Starley Robert 2057 15


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

West is Best at the 4NCL, Rounds 1-2, 22-23 October 2022

 The 4NCL , Britain's only professional chess league, has, like many chess events, been disrupted by the ongoing pandemic. The 2019-20 season was aborted six rounds in; there was no 2020-21 season, and the 2021-22 season was an experimental format for that season only: a Swiss system (chosen so that if it needed to terminate early, the final finishing positions would still be reasonable ones). The twelve teams who finished at the top of the Swiss that year would be in Division 1 in the new 2022-23 season, and my team, West Is Best, were one of the lucky twelve. This was naturally always going to be a tricky season to negotiate, and the way the draw was done meant we could expect a rocky start: the top six finishers of the previous season were paired to face the teams finishing 7th-12th in the first six rounds of the season, thus maximizing the chances of exciting promotion and relegation clashes occurring towards the end. Thus, arriving at the Daventry Court Hotel on the Saturday,
Read more

Great Players: Ignatz von Kolisch

Image
I first referenced this video in the piece about Alexander Petrov , but it bears another look: You will notice that  Paul Morphy was dominant throughout his entire competitive career, but his reign as world #1 was interrupted briefly by a player called Kolisch, who then almost immediately disappears from the scene. So this piqued my interest: who was this mysterious Kolisch, and why is his name so much less familiar than those of his contemporaries? Well, the answer, on looking at his  Wikipedia article , seems to be that he just had a very short playing career, and did not play much against the big names of his day. This is backed up by his chessgames page , which shows nearly all his games coming in the years 1857-1867. This did, however, include two triumphs in international tournaments. One was the relatively weak Cambridge 1860 event, but the other was the rather stronger  Paris 1867 event, which would also star future world champion Steinitz. This tournament effectively mark
Read more

British Championship 2022, Round 9

 How would tournament leader Harry Grieve approach Round 9 ? He knew beforehand that a draw would be sufficient to get him a GM norm and a playoff place (or outright victory if N Pert - Arkell was a draw), and many people speculated that he would play a very solid opening to maximize his drawing chances. Not a bit of it; he played a very adventurous opening in which he sacrificed the exchange early on, and ended up sacrificing another one later. For a long while, it wasn't clear what the result would be, and when Pert got an early advantage against Arkell and smoothly converted it, the organizing team were gearing themselves up for a playoff. It turned out not to be necessary; the complications eventually resolved in Grieve's favour, and he ended up delivering mate in a position where his opponent's two queens were useless to prevent it. He thus won the tournament outright, as well as obtaining his final IM norm (and the title) and first GM norm. Nick Pert finished second,
Read more