Kingston A v Kingston B, Thames Valley division 1 match played at the Richard Mayo Centre, United Reformed Church, Kingston on 12 October 2026

After the two intra-club battles in the Surrey League in September, two intranecine battles in the Thames Valley League were top of the agenda for October. The cast list was a little different, with teams of only six rather than eight, but the drama was higher, with the final result in doubt for some time. The match featured two epic games, for which I shall keep you in suspense because they were late finishers.   

Stephen Moss and John Foley have known each other since they met at Oxford some 50 years ago, but apparently had never played a classical game against each other, until they met on board 5. The game was a “bloodless” draw – a success for Stephen, as the lower-rated player, and for John as Black.

The board 6 game between David Rowson and Jon Eckert included a neat trap set by David. Jon avoided it, but found White had an edge anyway.

White’s continued to press and eventually, a pawn down and facing a dangerous passed d-pawn (see position below), Black resigned. But later engine analysis suggested the resignation is premature as Black has significant counterplay against the pawn on f2 and White will need to redeploy his rooks to activate the passed pawn. The post-mortems will continue, but the scoresheet recorded 1-0 to Kingston A.

My game on board 4 with Tom Mayers hung on decisions made just after the tactical skirmishes had ended in my favour.

On board 2, Peter Large made little progress with White against solid play from Alan Scrimgour until the transition from middlegame to endgame, when he exploited an isolated pawn and the remains of Alan’s queenside pawn storm to win two pawns, which was decisive.

On board 1, David Maycock was once again drawn against Harvey Li (pictured above), this time with Black. Afterwards, David described the game as “up and down”, and I concur.

Frustrating for young Harvey to come so close against David a second time, but he can be encouraged by going 60 moves with an ECF 2450 player, and there is always a good deal to learn from such an eventful game.

That win gave the A team an unassailable 4-1 lead, but the B team, in the shape of Martyn Jones against Jasper Tambini, hit back on board 3.  This was an extraordinary game in which both sides were clearly winning at different stages until it resolved into an unbalanced endgame evaluated by my machine as equal. Martyn must have outplayed Jasper in it, but how is not recorded – understandably, given the high-jeopardy opening and middlegame, both sides were short of time in the ending. Both players have a reputation as good box office, which games such as this can only reinforce.

So in the end a 4-2 win for the A team. We like to believe there will be a fair few teams in Thames Valley division 1 which do not get as many as the two scored by the B team. The sort of match which stimulates enthusiasm, so roll on next week when As and Bs meet again in the last of these fraternal battles for the season.

South Norwood v Kingston, Lauder Trophy quarter-final played at West Thornton Community Centre, Thornton Heath on 1 October 2026

The Lauder Trophy is a knockout competition for teams of six restricted to a total rating of a maximum of 10,500 ECF rating points, a handicapping system which allows smaller clubs to compete on more-or-less level terms with larger ones. There is a premium on finding a selection which uses as much of the point count as possible, and on finding underrated players.

A Thursday night trip away to South Norwood makes availability and logistics a little more difficult. We arrived to find that South Norwood actually outrated us slightly – we were to face large deficits on boards 1 and 5, so needed the middle order to score well.

Alex Chmelev got us off to a good start on board 3. Playing Black against Simon Lea, the opening did not go well and he soon lost his a-pawn. But Simon did not choose the best way to win the pawn, struggled to extricate the knight which had led the raid, and then made several more mistakes which allowed Alex to win decisive material.

Eoin and Ethan Fox, on boards 5 and 6, had had good results in the summer simul games against David Maycock and Harry Grieve, and seemed to me to be underrated. Both had long games which went to the endgame, Eoin’s looking blocked and Ethan’s more open. In the event, both ended in draws, a terrific result for Eoin with Black against Ken Chamberlain, an experienced player who outrated him by around 200 points.

In the same way that if there has been an unusually high-scoring Premier League football match a great many people will stay up to watch Match of the Day hoping it will be the first game, this report may have attracted readers who have heard on the grapevine or read on WhatsApp that Stephen Moss won on board 4 with the Muzio Gambit.

Everyone who saw the game on the night categorised it as a Muzio, but strictly speaking it is the Rosentreter Gambit, named after the gambit-loving German player Lieutenant-Colonel Adolf Rosentreter (1844-1920). It involves playing 4. d4 rather than 4. Bc4, the more usual Muzio version, though the theme of out-and-out attack homing in on f7 is the same. The gambit is the sort of wild stuff played in the 19th century when football teams still had five forwards. The game was the chess equivalent of conceding a couple of goals in the first few minutes and coming back to win. As with Premier League goalfests, this one had the respective managers tearing their hair out, but it was great entertainment and Stephen showed real enterprise to keep his initiative alive.          

I was always fairly confident about board 2, where John Foley (pictured above, in Uzbek hat) had shaken off any jet lag from his recent visit to Samarkand to receive his honour as Fide chess educator of the year. He took an early advantage against Paul Dupré, missed one opportunity to drive it home, but then seized the chance to win a pawn and expose the black king when Paul unwisely castled queenside. This was the key passage of play.

John reminded me that there was an earlier occasion when he won a game against Paul in which Paul had castled queenside and John kingside. Indeed, John annotated it for the Games section, and it can be found here in all its glory. But that was a wildly exciting battle, whereas this was fairly plain sailing. And it was a reminder that in those days South Norwood 1 were among the division 2 establishment while Kingston 2 expected to struggle to survive there. In less than three years since, the two teams have moved in opposite directions. Good times and bad can change very quickly, in chess as in life.

I have deferred for as long as possible writing about my own game, which was the last to finish. On arrival, I was surprised to face Tariq Oozeerally, who had not played a game for South Norwood for more than two years, but is rated 2170 so with Black an uphill struggle loomed.

After a quiet opening, he went for the throat and I found a rebuttal. I thought I might be slightly better (rightly, as it turned out) and was tempted to offer a draw as I was behind on the clock and the other games looked OK. But for the same reasons he would probably have declined. In the end, time was critical. The closing stages were not recorded, so the reader will have to cope with the frustration you feel when you watch your side holding a good draw away at one of the big clubs on TV, go out to have a cuppa, and return to find the roof has fallen in while you were away. Here’s what I could capture of the action.

Galling. But overall a 4-2 win against the rating edge and away from home was a good effort. Some time over the next three months we shall have a home semi-final against Coulsdon.

Peter Andrews is Kingston Lauder Trophy captain and club chair

Kingston 2 v Kingston 1, Surrey League division 1 match played at the Richard Mayo Centre, United Reformed Church, Kingston on 21 September 2026

A week after the first division 1 match between Kingston’s first and second teams came the return fixture, this time with Kingston 2 at home (the league designates a “home” team even when both teams are in effect at home). The toss once again gave the first team White on the odd boards. Both teams were a little stronger than in the earlier match. Most of the games were well contested and long, and the final score flattered the stronger side.

Three games finished relatively early. On board 5, young Harvey Li scored a quick win
against Martyn Jones. In a standard-looking Queens Gambit Declined, a single wasted move allowing White to make the critical e4 break, and the resulting pressure led to a quick collapse.

On board 3, Zain Patel’s sharp eye (there is another example in the puzzles section of this month’s English Chess Federation online magazine Chess Moves, which is loaded with Kingston achievements) led to the win of a pawn against David Rowson. The extra pawn was an advanced passed d-pawn in the early stages of the endgame, and further tactics exploiting it to win a piece meant that the later stages were not required. Here is the critical stage of the game.

Between those two, on board 4, Stephen Lovell had held Julian Ward (who was making his Kingston debut) to a draw; Julian felt that he’d had a slight edge, made a slip and the game levelled out.

The board 8 game between Jon Eckert and myself was always close to level. I found a late middlegame trick to win a pawn, but Jon had compensation and soon found a trick to win it back, at which point a draw was agreed. Stockfish rated us both at 96% accuracy, unusually high at this level, which explains why the evaluation never changed much.

Alan Scrimgour and Peter Hasson both recommended their game on board 6 to me as an interesting one, but it seems that they both missed just how interesting the finish was!

Joshua Pirgon v Tom Mayers on board 7 was another game recommended to me by the
loser as a particularly interesting one. Tom prepared some very detailed notes on it
afterwards – looking through games that you have lost, although painful, really is the way to learn. I subjected the game and the notes to the Stockfish engine on Lichess, and found some remarkable tactics all the way through.

I’m usually wary of showing openings in these columns for fear of facilitating preparation by other clubs against our players later. But in this case White’s opening disaster was an important part of the story of the game and is very unlikely to be repeated. So here is the whole of the game until it was decided as a contest: sit back and enjoy, with a scotch in your hand, a cold towel round your head, or Mozart in the background, as best helps you grapple with complexity. Although there are errors, that is inevitable in a game like this, and it reflects very well on the resourcefulness of two of our younger newcomers. It also proves, incidentally, that 1. b3 is not for herbivores wanting a quiet life.

Board 2, Jasper Tambini v Peter Large, was not quite the spectacle we might have expected from players with contrasting styles. I confess I had not realised Jasper had the London System in his armoury. But after a fairly even battle it livened up in the time scramble.

Jasper (pictured top right, next to John Hawksworth) commented afterwards that if he didn’t often win games from lost positions there wouldn’t be much point playing. This sudden turnaround was hard on Peter, but it did finally give the second team a win to celebrate.

There was drama of a different kind on board 1, where David Maycock won on time against John Hawksworth in a position where Black had a winning advantage. John has undergone the painful therapy of producing a high-quality analysis for the Games section, so I will only note here that David’s determination and will to win even in bad positions are among the qualities which have made him one of the rocks of our success since he joined us five years ago.

So overall another win for Kingston 1, 6-2 this time, but no cause for complacency. We hope these matches have warmed everyone up for the crucial Alexander Cup battle against Guildford on Monday 5 October, and look forward with mixed feelings to the two derby matches in the Thames Valley League later in the month.

Peter Andrews is Kingston first-team captain and club chair

Kingston 1 v Kingston 2, Surrey League division 1 match played at the Richard Mayo Centre, United Reformed Church, Kingston on 21 September 2026

Kingston 2 were promoted to Surrey League division 1 after the 2025-26 season, and under league rules that meant the new season had to start with the two matches between Kingston 1 and Kingston 2, to avoid any suggestion of collusion to achieve a particular result.

I was in the unusual position of captaining both sides, and slightly adjusted the team selection to allow two young newcomers, Harvey Li and Joshua Pirgon, to have a go against two of the first-team stars, when on strict rating order they would themselves have played in the first team. Nevertheless the first team had a huge rating advantage, well over 200 points a board.

Although the final score looks convincing, the course of the match was anything but. Every game was a hard slog, with all going the distance in terms of time and most in terms of move count. Not an easy match with which to start this season’s resolution of shorter reports.   

White had a good evening. The first team won all four of its games with White on the odd boards, while the second team took draws on 2, 4 and 6, and were no worse on 8 until close to the end.     

To start with the first-team games with White. Stephen Moss had warned Harvey Li to expect a Spanish from David Maycock, from which 12-year-old Harvey politely but firmly demurred since he rarely plays 1…e5.  By a circuitous route the game was actually a French, from which David got nothing until the late middle game. Then a subtlety gave him a tempo to re-route a knight, allowing him to turn the screw, win a critical pawn, and eventually reach a winning queen v two rooks endgame.

On board 3, the players castled on opposite sides. Emerging from the opening, Tom Mayers missed an unusual fork of two pawns by John Hawksworth’s queen. This opened a line against John’s king, but his position was solid, enabling him to win two more pawns and grind Tom down in the ending.

On board 5, Jon Eckert’s renowned French resisted Jasper Tambini’s renowned aggression against it down to a rook and pawn ending in which White had only a slender edge, but one miscalculation quickly turned that edge into a win. On board 7, David Rowson had an unconvincing opening against Stephen Moss. As on board 3, kings castled on opposite sides, and David was able to co-ordinate his pieces more effectively to develop an attack which was enough to lead to a decisive endgame advantage.

Among the second-team games with White, John Bussmann had an edge throughout against Julian Way on board 4, and missed an opportunity for a decisive breakthrough just before the end, when he still had a slight edge in a position agreed as a draw.

Warren-Scrimgour (pictured, top) on board 8 was even for a long time. Seth gave up a pawn, but there seemed no chance that Alan could unravel without giving it back. The conundrum was solved with a trademark Scrimgour exchange sacrifice. Although the evaluation immediately after the sacrifice was still level, White’s game was more difficult for a human to play. Alan was able to win back the exchange by trapping Seth’s rook in mid-board and get his pawns rolling, after which the win was more comfortable than had seemed likely for most of the evening.

Board 2, Pirgon-Large, was the last game to finish. To a spectator’s eye, White seemed to have a useful space advantage for much of the game, but Black’s position had insufficient weaknesses for White to stretch the defence and the evaluation was always well within the drawing range, at least until time was short enough that the remainder of the game was unrecorded. A draw against IM Large was an encouraging start to Joshua’s Kingston career.

Board 6 saw the welcome return to our midst of Ian Mason from the far side of the Atlantic, from which he has sometimes joined KCC online. Ian has taken up the role of committee secretary at Kingston, and in his opening game he had to face your correspondent. This game featured the only real middlegame drama. As so often these days it was an opportunity I missed, and only discovered when looking at the game with the machine.  What should Black play here?

Overall, then, a useful 6.5-1.5 win for the first team in their attempt to retain the title, but the second team showed enough against what has after all been the strongest side in the division to suggest that they could severely test the rest of the opposition. And we may hope that having eight such tough games will shake the rust off all the participants for the rest of the season.  

Peter Andrews is Kingston first-team captain and club chair

Wimbledon 1 v Kingston 1, Surrey League division 1 match played at St Winefride’s Church Hall, Wimbledon SW19 on 23 April 2026

Kingston had secured the Surrey League division 1 (Surrey Trophy) title the previous week by beating Guildford, and Wimbledon were already assured of relegation,  but although the Kingston team was somewhat depleted by a mixture of work commitments, medical factors and the clash with the World Seniors in Albania, there was no end-of-term feel to the fighting chess in this match.

We started 1 up when David Rowson’s board 6 opponent failed to appear. Then on board 3 John Hawksworth, with Black, drew quickly with Neil Cannon after some missed opportunities arising out of the Smith-Morra Gambit.  

Martyn Jones has played some powerful chess recently, and his board 7 game with Black against Stephen Carpenter was another example.

Ash Stewart’s appearances this season have been limited by other commitments, but we were very grateful to have him for a match for which several of our strongest players were missing, and he showed his class on board 2 with White against Marcus Baker. His notes, on which those below are based, reveal his care to minimise opportunities for an opponent known to be a dangerous attacking player with several strong scalps over the past two seasons. After some opening nuances, White already had a decent edge when the tactics began.

Hereabouts two promising games went wrong. On board 8, Xavier Cowan built a strong attack with White on his first-team debut, but he was already almost on the increment by move 18, and somewhere in the scramble (which meant that the key part of the game is lost to history) things went downhill and he lost to Georgi Velikov.

My own defeat with Black on board 5 against the indefatigable Gordon Rennie was the result of too much confidence rather than too little time. I had won a critical game for the Bank of England in the City Chess Association League the previous evening, and when a pseudo-sacrifice could not be accepted and gave me an advantage in space and co-ordination, I lost my sense of danger with fatal results.

A 3.5-2.5 lead was not totally safe with board 1 looking level and board 4 a bit dicey. On board 1, Peter Lalić is of course confident in his ability to win queenless middle games with fewer tactical risks, but this time with Black against Dan Rosen he did not gain an advantage until all the pieces had gone. We joked (OK, not quite Michael McIntyre class) that next time he might try to exclude all danger by playing to win on a completely empty board.  Humour aside, there were some instructive points both in the pawn endgame and the subsequent queen endgame.

On board 4, Jasper Tambini was mindful that a win might be needed, and, with White against Sean Ingle’s redoubtable French Defence, was eventually rewarded for a gutsy choice to decline a draw when objectively worse, although ahead on the clock.

So the match finished 5.5-2.5, a reasonable outcome for both teams given that Kingston were missing some big hitters and Wimbledon were up against it in rating terms. Overall that meant Kingston repeated their achievement of 2024/25 by winning division 1 of the Surrey League with seven match points out of eight, although we won half a game point less this time round.

Fourteen different players represented Kingston 1 this season, a smaller number than played for Kingston 2 despite first-team matches involving an extra board, and strong availability at the head of the team was the primary reason for its overall success. David Maycock scored 6.5/7, a remarkable effort given the strength of the opposition – the only half-point he dropped was to the prodigious Supratit Banerjee, whom he beat in the return. Peters Lalić and Large scored 6.5/8 and 5/6 respectively. Those performances on the top three boards meant that scores either side of 50% by other regulars were sufficient to see us home. A special mention goes to Jasper Tambini, after Peter Lalić the only other ever-present.

Peter Andrews is Kingston 1 captain in Surrey League division 1

Final Surrey Trophy (Div 1) table

Kingston A v Ealing A, Thames Valley League division 1 match played at the Richard Mayo Centre, United Reformed Church, Kingston on 20 April 2026

The visit of Ealing was significant for both Kingston A, looking to maintain their lead in Thames Valley League Division 1, and Kingston B, for whom Ealing are relegation rivals. It was therefore not ideal that the match coincided with the World Senior Team Championship in Albania, so Kingston were without their usual captain, IM Peter Large, although we welcomed John Foley back from a recent medical absence. Notwithstanding our rating advantage, it was a very well-contested match, with all six games going the distance in terms of time, moves or both, and for much of the evening the outcome was in doubt. The consensus at the end was that the score flattered Kingston on the run of play.

John Foley’s game on board 6 was the first to come to the boil. His play was full of energy, a brilliancy in the offing, and then went wrong, requiring a courageous rescue.

The game I was most confident of from an early stage was John Hawksworth’s on board 3. He has kindly provided notes on the whole game on which the following draw heavily.

Julian Way’s game on board 4 also only seemed likely to have one of two results, although it was some time before he had more than the edge White starts with.

When the teamsheets were exchanged, the smart money was on board 5 to produce an entertaining clash, since both Xavier Cowan, in the Surrey League a Kingston player but in the TVL representing his original club, and our own Jasper Tambini enjoy a battle. FM Vladimir Li kindly provided some expert evaluations in real time on most of the games for the benefit of those following on WhatsApp, but admitted he would have needed an engine for this one. Even more mind-blowing, neither player realised when White resigned that the final position was a draw – that only emerged when the engines dissected the drama several hours later.

And so, as in so many Kingston matches, the last two games in progress were those of David Maycock and Peter Lalić, although this time we had already scored enough to win the match. That was just as well, for neither were having things all their own way. On board 1, FM Andrew Harley had played very well against David. David has a great talent for continually creating activity and hence pressure, the more so as time runs short, but on this occasion he was definitely running a risk.

On board 2, Peter Lalić had defied stereotype by starting with 1. e4, but found himself on unfamiliar ground in the Petrov. He gained an advantage which gradually slipped away, and found himself in the unusual position of having to defend a difficult ending – more characteristically with very little time on the clock.

So there it was, a 5-1 win which could easily have been 3-3, and six games which all had some meat in, hence the length of this report. The A team now have a four-point lead over Hammersmith with only six more on the table, so confidence is justified, but, as these games showed, concentration and tenacity are still required. 

Peter Andrews was acting captain of Kingston A in this match

Kingston 1 v Guildford 1, Surrey League division 1 match played at the Richard Mayo Centre, United Reformed Church, Kingston on 13 April 2026

Kingston v Guildford is a very friendly but very keen rivalry, and this clash had plenty riding on it. If either team won the match, they would win the division 1 title. A 4-4 draw would favour Kingston without being decisive – it would mean that a 4-4 draw or better against Wimbledon when we travel there on 23 April would suffice for the title.

Two strong teams lined up, with Kingston having the rating advantage on the top two boards while the lower boards looked well matched. We had the further advantage of a non-playing captain to ease the nerves when our board 1 was slightly late. Clive Frostick won the toss for Guildford, worthwhile given the colour preferences of our top two, without being of the same materiality as in division 2 where the matches are of an odd number of boards.

The early returns maintained the suspense. On board 7, Julian Way took a quick draw – he was outrated and had Black, while Clive Frostick was fatigued after taking part in the Guildford Congress over the weekend. Board 4, John Hawksworth v Matthew Dishman, was almost as short – John was suffering from an energy-sapping foot injury. Board 6, Peter Hasson v Timothy Foster, took longer but had the same result – in an accurately played game by both sides, Peter maintained roughly his initial edge as White, but never more. The a-file opened early, creating an avenue for the major pieces to exchange themselves off, and there was no obvious lever for either side to make something of the minor-piece ending.

On board 5, Zain Patel, with Black facing Adrian Wallace, had seemed to me to be in some early danger, with the “Greek Gift” (for new readers, a situation in which say White is able to sacrifice Bxh7+ and after Kxh7 to play Ng5+ and Qh5, mating on h7) in the air because of the shortage of black minor pieces defending the king. However, a subsequent tour of the hall showed that he had stabilised the situation, and I mentally chalked up another valuable half-point.

Relaxing over a coffee in the foyer, I was soon alarmed to see Zain emerge from the playing area with a wry look suggesting that he had done some schoolboy mischief and was hoping to escape unnoticed. I rushed over to relieve him of his scoresheet for this report, ready to offer some consoling words, and was amazed to see the glorious digits 0-1 at the bottom. With his usual endearing modesty, he explained that his win had resulted from a simple blunder. In such a close and critical match, most of us would have enjoyed the win whatever its artistic shortcomings, but he had indeed dodged a bullet in the middle game as well as being the recipient of a gift at the end as we see below.

With that hurdle overcome, I was confident of the match result, with all the remaining boards looking at least safe. On board 8 Jasper Tambini, facing the rising junior Alistair Jennis, had played the sort of gambit he enjoys against solid black systems like the French and Caro-Kann. Initially the compensation looked modest, but he was clearly the more comfortable in the kind of game which had resulted.

On board 3, Peter Large, playing an old adversary and team-mate in Nigel Povah, had a long and tense struggle, but as on boards 4, 6 and 7 there were no big swings in the advantage, though there was an interesting phase in the queenless middle game in which Peter correctly refused an offered pawn.

So we had a 4-2 lead with the top two boards outstanding. And outstanding is the best description of the scores racked up by Messrs Lalić and Maycock this season in their contrasting styles. Peter Lalić played one of his idiosyncratic openings with White against FM Jon Ady to reach the kind of queenless middle game in which he is far more experienced than even strong and titled opponents, and then came up with an interesting idea.

Peter may have been a little disappointed only to draw a game in which he had been well on top for several hours. But it was the half-point that got us over the line in the match and for the title, and so warmly appreciated by his team-mates and other club members gathered round the board.

David Maycock produced a classy effort with Black to grind down the formidable Gwilym Price on board 1. A characteristically principled opening gave him an advantage in activity which, although small, is the kind of edge which can be turned into a win at this level. The conversion process was more Lalićian, with long periods in which White was left to chafe against his fetters, than Maycockian, with fireworks, but none the less instructive for that, so with David’s kind agreement the whole game is given here.

Peter Andrews is Kingston 1 captain in the Surrey League