A pair of OTB Yorkshire games

In case you hadn't guessed, I've been having some fun using AI image generators for the header images, it seems one (perhaps the only?) worthwhile use case for such toys is to create low-quality space-filling clip-art more quickly and capably than a non-expert such as myself could readily do themselves. Unfortunately I couldn't persuade Craiyon to use the proper White Rose of York flag so you'll have to make do with a white rose. Harrumph. That's really quite poor.

Anyway, as well as the on-line 4NCL games, I play some more occasional OTB leagues with my local club. Recently, for the first time, I played in the Yorkshire U1850 team in the Northern Counties Championship, in a match against Cumbria. Matches are played over 12 boards and we had a well-stacked team with 6 players rated 1800+, against our opponents' one. However that one was rated 1849 and rising, having scored 8.5/10 in his recent games. My rating at the start of the month had drifted down to 1805 following a run of mediocre results, but due to the use of the September rating list for these matches, I had the dubious privilege of playing on top board. With the black pieces. Having just been well beaten on the black side of a Caro-Kann in my last 4NCL game, the odds weren't looking good when my opponent opened 1.e4 but I played my usual c6 anyway. We went down a line that was unfamiliar to me (though it's fairly mainline), I didn't make any early blunders but wasn't familiar with the main plans so was soon under pressure and spent the next 3 hours or so hanging on by my fingertips.

Meanwhile things were progressing well on the lower boards with the number of Yorkshire wins mounting up and we got past the magic 6.5 points for the match win. So at least nothing was riding on my game other than some rating points and pride. Having been well up on the clock for the first 3 hours of the game, my opponent started to sweat over finishing me off, take longer and longer over his moves while failing to find a knockout blow. I tried to add to this pressure with a few quick moves looking for counterplay, and finally with his time running out he blitzed out a mating attack...that wasn't. Suddenly a rook down with nothing to show for it, he resigned just before his flag fell. Here is the game with some light annotation:

Not my best game by a long way, and I don't really feel I deserved the win, but at least I kept fighting and put up as much resistance as I could. I've been on the other side of such situations often enough so I'm not going to complain about the cookie crumbling in my favour for a change. And I have re-read that chapter in my Caro-Kann book and should have a better idea of what to do next time I go down that line!

Then last weekend my local club Settle had a match against Holmfirth in the Yorkshire League. We were struggling for players, I drove down with two others, with two more from another club offering to sub in to make up numbers and provide some cannon fodder for our strong opponents. For some reason I'd got it into my head that I was likely to be playing a particular strong junior so prepared for his usual opening. Turned out I was wrong in my guess and I was actually playing an even stronger junior! Fortunately I misread his rating as 1871 so thought I might have a chance if I played well. After the game I realised it was actually 1971. We went down one of my favourite KID/4PA lines, everything went perfectly for me and I finished him off in 25 moves!

He's my highest-rated victim by about 100 points and makes all the near-misses at the end of last year worthwhile. I am starting to think there may be something in my plan of playing more serious classical chess. I think I've played 11 this year so far, 7 OTB and 4 in the online 4NCL.