Kingston B v Maidenhead B, Thames Valley division 2 match played at the Willoughby Arms, Kingston on 4 November 2024

This was a very tight-run thing. In ratings terms we should have won the match comfortably – we had a big ratings plus on the top three boards and smaller pluses on the bottom three. But a couple of hours into the match, with Kingston 2-0 down after blunders by Peter Roche on board 4 and Jon Eckert on 5, it did not feel like that at all. Maidenhead B had won both their early Thames Valley division 2 fixtures, and I feared they were going to claim another scalp.

The tide began to turn when the ever reliable Peter Andrews, playing Black, defeated Maidenhead veteran Nigel Dennis on board 3.

We were at last on the scoreboard. Board 1 looked tight, board 2 was impenetrable and had been unbalanced from an early stage, but on board 6 Alicia Mason looked like she had an edge with White against Yury Krylov. Could she convert? The match now seemed to hinge on her doing so.

Alicia, who had White, has kindly annotated her game for the Games section. She had a small plus throughout, but her opponent kept very nearly equalising. The game was rich in tactical possibilities, and, as Alicia very honestly admits in her annotation, there were a couple of sacs she missed that would have given her a winning advantage much earlier. But in the end, despite being in short of time, she found a neat combination to mate her opponent with queen and knight to level the match at 2-2. This was the final position after 44. Ne5# (how pleasant to mate with a knight move and get a royal fork at the same time!)

Now all eyes were on boards 1 and 2. David Rowson’s game had been fascinating throughout. He picks up the story after move 6.

The game ended in a draw and, since David has promised to annotate it for the Games section when he has time, I will not attempt to follow its twists and turns here. A draw was agreed in the position below:

David’s summing up afterwards was characteristically disarming: “In retrospect it was a very interesting game. There seemed to be a lot of points where I had to make difficult decisions, and generally I made the wrong ones according to Stockfish, which does, however, assess the final position as only very slightly favourable to Black, despite the bishop on e4 and the grip he has on the kingside. I’ve discovered that maybe my opening pawn grab wasn’t so bad after all – it’s been played by Tiviakov and Smirin. The problem was how I followed it up!”

The draw on board 2 left the match tied at 2.5-2.5. Could Peter Hasson, with Black on board 1, put the ball in the back of the net on his home debut for Kingston. His doughty opponent, Majid Mashayekh, seemed intent on parking the bus and playing for a draw – he may have looked at that 2-0 scoreline early on and decided a draw would be enough to win the match for Maidenhead. He was also heavily outrated, so a draw with White would have been a perfectly acceptable result, but Peter had other ideas, as he explains below:

Thanks to Peter’s clever combination, we were home and had survived that early scare. Well done to Maidenhead B for making such a fight of it given that they were heavily outrated and had lost their top board just hours before the match. We were mighty relieved to get the win, and are now 2/2 in Thames Valley division 2. It is, though, far too soon to be dreaming of glory. This eight-team division, with matches home and away, is going to be a long slog.

Stephen Moss, Kingston club captain