NCL: Ilford beat Barking (for a change)

NORTH CIRCULAR CHESS LEAGUE DIVISION A 5th.February.2024

ILFORD I 3½ – 2½ BARKING I

1996 ALEXANDR PERESLAVTSEV 1-0 JEFF GOLDBERG 2133
1973 NEVILLE TWITCHELL 0-1 PETER JASZKIWSKYJ 2002
1925 RAHUL GHOSE ½ COLIN RAMAGE 1927
1802 VENKATESH SUBRAMANIAN 0-1 J AMES ROBINSON 1860
1806 ANTHONY KENT 1-0 MIHAITA BLAGIANU 1649
1672 ADHAR JAISWAL 1-0 VLADIMIR CHTYM 1470

Ilford won the toss: White on odd boards

Time Control: 80 minutes & 10 seconds a move

(Based on notes by Jef Page) An excellent result for Ilford. The first time in a few moons that we have beaten Barking’s 1st team – a bit of a shock for them. They didn’t quite have their usual full team out. We won the match in the old Ilford way: holding the top boards but winning the bottom ones. This was the return home match after they demolished us 4.5 – 1.5 at Barking earlier in the season.

Venkatesh arrived late on board 4 and couldn’t prevent Robinson from winning a Knight. Neville won Peter’s Queen for 2 Rooks, but the open board favoured the Rooks. Although Neville tried to run a pawn down the board, his Q could not do enough to support it. Ramage put Ghose’s King under a lot of pressure and he was forced to give up the exchange. However with a lot of pawns to the good this was compensation enough for Rahul to hold out and force a draw. Blagianu paid the penalty for losing a pawn early on in the Bishops opening and then getting the h&g pawns ‘doubled’. Tony never released his grip on the position, and a final N fork of Q&R settled the issue.

Sergey (father) and son Alexandr came over from Upminster to play for us on board 1 in our return home match and he made it a ‘double’ win over Jeff again. A long, cagey, positional game was played out as Alex pinned Goldberg back and neatly won the exchange.The last game to finish was Adhar’s in a long,drawn out R, N and pawn ending. It looked like Vladimir might be able to hold out for draw but a final blunder cost him his N and he lost the ending clinching the match for us.

After only a few NCCL matches league positions are: Barking, Wanstead, 4 match points each. Ilford 2 match points, 8½ game points; Chingford 2 match points, 7 game points. Our NCCL next match is : Ilford v Chingford 4th March. Thanks to all the Ilford players for turning out for us.