Yesterday we played against Bellshill chess club in the semi finals of the Spens cup.
The venue was The Salutation Hotel, Perth. It was a great venue other than some noise issues around 1730. Thank you to Hamish Glen, the other team’s captain, who arranged the venue.
It was a tight match – it felt much tighter than the scoreline would suggest:
| Hamish Olson (white) | 2370 | 1-0 | Graeme Nolan (black) | 2178 |
| Euan Gray | 2118 | 0-1 | Daniel Deary | 2031 |
| Daniel Maxwell | 2129 | 1-0 | David Deary | 1739 |
| Ian McDonald | 1826 | 1-0 | Cooper Patterson | 1633 |
| Jan Berg | U/G | 1-0 | Shea McPherson | 1539 |
Around about 90 minutes in I had a very promising position. Euan looked a bit worse and was getting a bit low on time. Daniel had a typical edge for the opening. Ian was a clean pawn down and Jan looked clearly worse.
At this stage I had no idea what the match result would be although I was reassured that the tiebreaks could be favourable to us if Daniel and I converted, and one of the other three got a draw.
Oor Daniel was the first to finish – his opponent played a very decent first 20-25 moves but then missed a tactic and lost.
Unfortunately Euan’s game (which morphed from a QID type structure into a Breyer type and then into a Benoni!?) was next to finish and their Daniel had clearly seen Penrose-Tal (https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/dec/02/jonathan-penrose-obituary ) as he played a nice break with e5 and d6 and f5.
After that I didn’t get to see the scores again until my opponent asked when we were the last game still going. On being informed it was 3-1 (after clarifying in whose favour!) he promptly resigned – it was a lost position and he wanted to go home.
My game had gotten quite wild. I had sacrificed a piece for long term compensation. For most of the game I was much better but there were also some chances for him to be better. Eventually I got an attack going and then converted to a winning endgame.
I had noticed Jan’s game turning around a bit but the fact that Ian managed to win was a complete shock to me – I thought he might draw if we were lucky as it was opposite coloured bishops (albeit +4 for his opponent).
This was our strongest team that we have fielded so far and despite what the scoreline suggests I think we needed it to pull through.
In the finals we face Bank of Scotland who bested Wandering Dragons in their Semi-Final on board count (https://wanderingdragonschess.club/blogs/64)
bonaccordchess 