Hand and Brain Tournament

Last Tuesday (15th July) saw the club hosting a Hand and Brain double round robin blitz tournament.
In Hand and Brain players play in pairs across a normal game of chess. The Brain states which piece, e.g. "bishop", and the Hand chooses which bishop and where to move it. As you can imagine there was plenty of chaos and confusion as Hands picked up the wrong piece and Brains did not say the right piece (sometimes for several moves!). All in all a good, fun evening.
It become clear after a couple of rounds that teams JJ (James Leare and Jordy Savill), DJ (Daniel and Jathan), and Youth & Experience (Anthony and Iaroslav) were in it to win it. Going into the last round Youth & Experience were leading with 6.5 points, closely followed by JJ with 6 points, and not far behind them DJ with 5 points. In quite a turnaround DJ managed a 2-0 win over Youth & Experience catapulting them into the lead with 7 points. JJ had been held to a draw in technical rook vs bishop endgame against the team Spirit of Spassky in their first game putting them up to 6.5 points. Their last game was the last game of the night so they knew that a win would push them above Youth & Experience to win the tournament and a draw leave them tied for first. As it happens the game went into quite wild territory and they looked on course for victory with a clear attack on their opponent's king, unfortunately playing on the increment is no easy business and one slip allowed their opponents to steal a win. This left JJ and Youth & Experience with 6.5/10 and DJ with 7/10.
Congratulations to team DJ for winning the tournament!