A bit of a drubbing to finish the year. Despite being heavily out graded initially things were going reasonably well and it looked as though we would challenge East Ham. Jef got a reasonably easy draw against Colin Ramage who swapped down to a very drawish endgame. However, after that thing started running against us and apart from Rahul’s excellent win on board 2 against a 2125 (Rahul is in fine form) the rest of the games were lost. Last to finish were Neville and myself. I got to a levelish endgame against Dave Sands but dropped a pawn and in the time pressure the game went away from me. Neville, a pawn down, looked to have found a way to draw a rook and opposite coloured bishop endgame but also under time pressure blundered. Full match details on the LL website.
Thanks to all who played and got there despite the icy pavements and rail strike.
Board East Ham 1 Ilford 1
1 (B) 2246 Sands, David A 1 – 0 Barton, Tom A 1935
2 
2125 Nikolaienko, Dmytro 0 – 1 Ghose, Rahul 1929
3 (B) 2025 Fleming, Nigel D 1 – 0 Twitchell, Neville H 1965
4 1990 Jaszkiwskyj, Peter 1 – 0 Subramanian, Venkatesh 1801
5 (B) 1900 Ramage, Colin R ½ – ½ Page, Jeffrey 1644
6 1890 Figueroa, Edison 1 – 0 Undre, Taha 1575
7 (B) 1804 Naumov, Igor 1 – 0 Jaiswal, Adhar 1556
8 1761 Berkley, Stephen W 1 – 0 Obiols, Biel 1618
Average 1968 6½ – 1½ Average 1753
Ilford Chess Club 