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, we knew we would not be in for an easy time, but our first round opponents, Celtic Tigers, looked reasonably beatable, outgrading us only by 100 points or so per board. And we got off to an excellent start when new signing Alice O'Donnell crushed her opponent in just 22 moves.

When my game finished, sadly in defeat, the match score was 1½-1½, and it looked as if anything could happen - Tim Kett was losing on board 6, but there were several other games where it looked like we might have the advantage. Having had a bad night's sleep the previous night, I went to lie down, and woke up later to the good news that we had won: Tim had miraculously held his piece-down position, Steven Jones had won a nice game on board 2, and the other games had been draws.

Sunday's match, sadly, brought us back down to earth, as we lost 6½-1½ to Wood Green. Our one consolation prize there was on board 7, where Doug Macfarlane won against one of our former players, Katarzyna Toma.

Our second team, playing in Division Three West, were also in action: they drew their Saturday match and won their Sunday match to give them 3 valuable points in the quest for promotion.






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