4NCL division 4 game played at the Mercure Hotel, Telford, on 19 November 2023

I do not relish the three-hour drive from Kingston to Telford to play in the 4NCL, in which Kingston partners with Chess in Schools and Communities under the able captaincy of Kate and Charlie Cooke, but this second-round game was memorable for me and reignited my interest in playing.

My opponent was educational psychologist and chess writer Barry Hymer, who was rated more than 200 points higher than me – I was 1763 ECF, he was 1975. He also had White. Life really isn’t fair, though my team-mate on board 1 in this match against Lancaster faced an even tougher proposition, up against IM Gediminas Sarakauskas, not the sort of player one would normally expect to be meeting in division 4. A case of what in opera is called “luxury casting”.

Barry immediately endeared himself to me by saying he had enjoyed my book. He also clearly knew all my quirks – laying out apple, Twix and water bottle on the table ready to consume them in the course of the afternoon. If I could eat a five-course meal at the board I would (absolutely banned by the arbiters at 4NCL, who allow no munching at the board). Barry said he would have been disappointed if I hadn’t come with a Twix – a motif in my book (The Rookie) when, after a surprise win against an experienced campaigner in Gibraltar, I convinced myself that eating a Twix during a game was the key to playing well (rather than, say, having an intimate knowledge of fashionable openings, an eye for complex middlegame tactics or some rudimentary sense of how to play the endgame).

I’m going to annotate this game, and apologise for its inadequacies. I want to show it because the long time control at 4NCL (especially compared to the thud and blunder of evening club chess) meant that for the first time in six or seven years I felt I was actually thinking properly (or almost properly) about chess – that zen moment when you become truly absorbed in a game. And in the endgame we reached a position which later came to fascinate me.

Normally once I have played a game I put it on my database, do some swift analysis with an engine (bad, I know, not to use my brain to work out all the variations) and then rarely look at it again. But I did return to this game and one crucial position in particular, shared it with friends and club-mates, and tried to think about it more critically than I usually do. I felt I was a chess player again.