Exeter Juniors 1½-2½ Sidmouth UPDATED

ByDrDave

UPDATE: Taylor’s game added

{White avoided an early Queen swap, which might have been a nuisance, but it
was a move leading out of the frying pan into the fire.}

{Black improvised in the opening and while trying to sort out the position
wasted a lot of the time that should be used to develop and get castled.
White crashed through the middle to win.}

See also: http://exeterchessclub.org.uk/content/making-it-you-go-along

{An early mistake by Black left White needing only to avoid an accident to win}

{Black wasn’t playing badly but overlooked a few simple threats by White to go
a Rook, a Knight and a few Pawns behind. White should have won easily enough
after that but somehow lost hold of both the Rook and the Knight and then
chose not to swap off the Queens. A draw was a generous outcome!}

Similar Posts

  • EJCC 1-3 Exeter Gambits 30th March 2012

    ByDrDave

    A close match ended in a 1-3 defeat for the youngsters. As so often in
    chess, it wouldn’t have taken much to reverse the score!

    The juniors, unusually, fielded a team which had a majority of girls.

    {1. A well-fought game: White got some attacking ideas muddled and lost a piece,
    but pressure won the exchange leaving an exciting RvNN endgame.}

    {2. A carefully-played game ended in a draw, but both sides missed good
    chances to go ahead.}

    {3. Black was allowed to launch a tactic to win a piece early on, after which White was not allowed much fun.}

    {4. Black grabbed a Rook but then seemed to run out of ideas; White then
    had an idea and Black missed it!}

  • Exeter Juniors (2½-1½) Seaton, 25th March 2011

    ByDrDave

    [Please ignore the stupid number of page visits, I think someone’s robot threw a wobbly]

    {
    White eventually took a loose pawn and played good aggressive chess to wrap up.
    }

    {Black had the advantage but allowed White to stop him castling, when there
    was always a mating attack up White’s sleeve.}

    {White made good use of his extra space and activity.}

    {Black let a pawn advantage slip through his fingers.}

  • |

    3 Nov

    ByDrDave

    Could I gently remind you to pay for the season if you haven’t already?

    Puzzle of the week: mate in one move — reckoned to be one of the hardest!

    Hints (click-drag-select to view):

    1. Black’s last move was with a pawn
    2. The e-pawn
    3. From e7
    4. eep…

     

  • Exeter Juniors 3-1 Torquay Boys Friday 2nd May 2014

    ByDrDave

    Exeter Juniors 3-1 Torquay Boys Friday 2nd May 2014

    Edmund Kelly (B) 1-0 Yul Lee (W)
    Taylor Finch 1-0 Alex Lee
    Leif Hafstad 1-0 Ben Sturt
    Codie Finch 0-1 Jakub Kubiak

    The home side scored a quick win when Taylor Finch picked
    up the black Queen using an ancient trap in the French Defence, but the visitors equalised soon after when Jakub Kubiak’s threat to the enemy King was ignored.

    Leif Hafstad was never in trouble with his own French Defence, and was
    happy to collect one pawn after another in a game where White
    never looked comfortable.

    Game of the day was a full-blooded struggle on top board, where
    a cheeky pawn grab in a Sicilian Defence led to the usual trouble
    surviving White’s extra development and activity. It looked certain
    that White was going to wrestle back the pawn, but Black hung on and eventually swapped enough material to emerge into a winning Bishop endgame.

    Yet the clock also had a say and, with Black’s hour almost up, a few hasty decisions nearly let the win slip. The evaluation of the position swung crazily between ‘Black win’ and ‘Draw’ almost move by move, but finally the extra pawn was promoted and Edmund delivered mate with seconds to spare.

    Another great match, well-contested on all boards, and credit to all involved.







  • EJCC 2-2 Newton Abbot Juniors 16th Dec 2011

    ByDrDave

    One of the best and best-contested matches I’ve had the pleasure to watch. Well done to all players!

    W Royle ½-½ Fraser
    B Trott ½-½ Whitehead
    S Keat 1-0 Ramesh
    B Terrill 0-1 Chornenkyy

    A tough game fought in the jungles of a hypermodern opening, in the end Black’s
    exchange was enough to balance an advanced passed pawn – or maybe the
    other way around!

    A wild game where both sides did enough to win…

    Some devilishly complicated opening play resulted in an early win of a
    piece for White.

  • Chess around the world

    ByDrDave

    I had a nice chat at the Spring tournament with Dr Pasupalety and Mr Sequiera, both of whom grew up playing chaturanga. This is thought to be the ancestor of many types of chess played now across the world.

    Chaturanga is a slow game, where the pawns can move only one square, there is no such thing as castling, and the Queen, called a Minister, is the weakest piece on the board!  The Bishops (Camels, or in some places Elephants) also had a different move.  When chess first came to Europe, it was in a form quite like this, and medieval chess had this same slow style.

    When Western chess-players started experimenting in the opening in the 1920s, they invented some defences where Black stayed away from the centre for a while, and these set-ups look like the set-ups used in chaturanga.  And that’s where we get the names King’s Indian Defence, Queen’s Indian Defence, and so on.

    When I first looked at the history of Western Chess, I thought that the original game was Chaturanga, a game played in India before 600AD. Chess as played in other countries seems to come from the Arab form of Chess called Shatranj. And that is what I used to tell people.

    But I now believe that the best picture that fits what we know says that Chaturanga and Shatranj were both later forms of an original game, which we don’t know much about. And whether China and Japan learned about chess from India or the Arab world, I don’t know.

    We know lots about shatranj, because there is a lot of writing about it.  Although the players were playing a different game, we can tell from their analysis that they were as good at shatranj as grandmasters are at chess.  In fact, al-Suli composed a chess problem that took hundreds of years for anyone to solve!

    I had thought of shatranj and chaturanga as part of chess history, so I was very tickled to meet people who had grown up with chaturanga as a living game.

    There are lots of different sorts of chess around the world that seem to come from the same stock, including:

    • Shatar (Mongolian Chess)
    • Sittuyin (Burmese Chess)
    • Makruk (Thai Chess)

    Each form of chess seems to have its own special rule that makes the game come alive. Burmese chess is the only sort of chess where you can decide where to put your pieces at the start of the game; Japanese chess is the only sort of chess that uses the ‘drops’ that we see in Exchange Chess; Chinese Chess is the only sort of chess that has the Cannon piece; modern Western Chess is the only sort of chess that has the super-duper Queen. (In fact, our game used to be called Le Jeu de la Dame enragée — the game with the Mad Queen!).  Castling, and the double-first-move of the pawn, are also later inventions in the Western tradition.

    You can read about all these different sorts of chess here:
    http://chessvariants.org/
    http://www.ancientchess.com/page/free-downloads.htm