Return to league chess

I played for Maldon A on Friday. Ironically my opponent played the English opening and we reached an almost identical position at move 6 to the game in my previous post except I castled instead of playing Rb8.  I got lucky as unfortunately my opponent left his queenside knight hanging on move 13 and his position disintegrated.  0-1 after 16 moves.

Lucky draw against Neil McDonald

While sorting through some old boxes today I come across the score book from probably one of the last tournaments I played. Although I haven't analysed this game I suspect my draw against Neil McDonald (at the time 202J now GM) was fortunate.

British Championships

Congratulations to Michael Adams who beat Nigel Short in a rapid playoff at the British Championships earlier this month. Unfortunately Short lost the second game of the playoff whilst employing one of my favourite openings - the Caro-Kann defence.

PGN Viewers

I was using the ChessTempo PGN viewer to display games on this blog, however I was unable to find the correct settings for the board to be displayed in IE - it worked fine in Firefox and Chrome browsers. Congratulations go to pgn4web (http://pgn4web.casaschi.net/board-generator.html) which is easy to use and works well in all three main web browsers.

Kiel Variation

Just shows how rusty I am. This game from the 2002 Czech championship shows how Qa4+ and attempting to grab a piece results in the white Queen being trapped

The Centre Counter Gambit

I have been asked to post a trap in the Centre Counter Gambit

The King's Gambit Tournament

I have just discovered that there is an annual FIDE rated tournament in Poland where every game begins with the King's Gambit. For details see http://www.chessbase.com/newsdetail.asp?newsid=7270

King's Gambit

Good to see that the King's Gambit still produces sharp games. The following is Nowicki vs Hetzer from the Najdorf Memorial tournament last week.