Horsham 5 Secure a Draw Despite Defaulting

Horsham 5 faced Bexhill 4 away on 24th January. It wasn't until we arrived at Bexhill that my grey cells clicked into action and realised that one of our players had become ineligible for the 5th team since the team selection had been made. This necessitated that we moved up boards 3 and 4, and declared a default against ourselves on board 4. Other team captains, and indeed players, please take care to avoid a similar mistake as the season progresses and more players get caught by the rule about 4 appearances for higher teams. As Fixtures Secretary, I do monitor this and maintain a list of nominated players on the Sussex League front page in LMS, which is also linked to from the League website. However this is always likely to be a few days in arrears, so beware.

Returning to the match, my game was first to finish on board 3. Much material remained, but neither of use seemed to be progressing and we agreed an early draw.

Ian Edgson on 1 summarised his game as follows:

"After a standard English opening, I missed a temporary rook for knight sacrifice followed by a pawn fork which put my opponent a pawn up. Whilst manoeuvring pieces in the hope I might perhaps be able to engineer an opposite coloured bishops endgame to improve my drawing chances, I realised my opponent was getting his pieces tied down and didn’t seem to have a plan . So I switched to swindle-mode, conjured up an attack which he wasn’t expecting and which he didn’t defend accurately enough. Then I managed to win back the material and open up the position to break through his back ranks with a mating combination."

That made the score level at 1.5 - 1.5, after accounting for our default.

Finally Peter Rankin got down to a king and pawn end game where he was 2 pawns down, but a mistake by his opponent let him reduce the arrears to 1 pawn. His remaining 2 pawns on opposite sides of the board were blocked by a single pawn on one side and doubled pawns on the other. Maintaining the opposition stopped either king breaking through and a draw was agreed.

Thus we rescued a draw overall, despite the default.