After 3 Rounds Bon Accord A was in joint lead with one other team, the formidable Tiger Sharks (a.k.a. Grantham Sharks in the 4NCL).
With IMs on the top three boards and 2200s on the bottom 2 they were never going to be a pushover and so it proved.
After the first set of five games things were looking pretty tasty for us at 3.5-1.5 for the good guys with some great upsets:
1.FM Murad Abdulla (black) 1-0 IM Ameet Ghasi (2485)
2.FM Hamish Olson (white) 1-0 IM Thomas Rendle (2367)
3.Julius Schwartz 0-1 IM Peter Roberson (2436)
4.Euan Gray 0.5-0.5 James Holland (2220)
5.Theodorous Vasiliadis 1-0 Bao Dong (2226)
Unfortunately the second set of results was a lot more one sided the other way:
1.FM Murad Abdulla(white) 0.5-0.5 IM Ameet Ghasi (2485)
2.FM Hamish Olson (black) 0.5-0.5 IM Thomas Rendle (2367)
3.Julius Schwartz 0-1 IM Peter Roberson (2436)
4.Euan Gray 0-1 James Holland (2220)
5.Theodorous Vasiliadis 0-1 Bao Dong (2226)
So the Sharks beat us 5.5-4.5 and are in outright first with two rounds to go.
Bon Accord B had their debut against the Chess Carolinas, a US team that has a mixture of players from North and South Carolina:
1.Richard Jennings 1-1 Henry Hasman
2.Ross Brennan 0-2 Ezra Etzel
3.Nihad Abdullazada 2-0 Eugene Mack
4.Vagif Ramazanov 2-0 Raghu Arramreddy
5.Michael McRoberts 1.5-0.5 Sushma Dasari (1634)
Not a bad debut – 6.5-3.5 victory.
On Wednesday 7pm the A team will play the “Mushrooms”
On Thursday 7pm the B team will be playing against Eton!
You can see my win against IM Thomas Rendle here : https://lichess.org/DKe18bTf
He started drifting in the queenless middlegame around move 20, giving me a better pawn structure (d-pawn influences centre more than his a-pawn) which initially he had enough activity for but that fizzled out. In the second game he was better but allowed a perpetual.
Theo’s back-and-forth win against Bao Dong can be viewed here: https://lichess.org/yMlpQa8b
He had a strong attack with some fine active/positional play in very typical Theo style, but then let things slip a bit only to bounce back at the end.