Kingston 1 v Epsom 1, Surrey League division 1 match played at the Willoughby Arms, Kingston, on 11 November 2024

This was the board 4 game in the crucial Kingston 1 v Epsom 1 Surrey League division 1 match. Mike’s win helped Kingston to an emphatic 6.5-1.5 victory and was memorable in its own right, characterised by what Mike likes to call “ultra-violence”, in this instance visited on a former team-mate who happily did not take the chess equivalent of GBH personally. This is the sort of game which only Mike can really play, as his use of the symbol ^ (explained in a footnote below) demonstrates. Prepare to be entertained, or, as Peter Andrews says in his match report, “Fasten your seatbelts!”.

It was great to have a proper fighting game with James after all these years, and I hope we see more of him over the board as he eases off the work. Certainly it was fun to play, and we both had smiles on our faces; the most shocking thing is the computer’s assessment – it only really objects to White’s first Rb4 lift. Not bad, for a crazed sac-happy human!

* In his annotation, Mike uses the symbol ^, inspired by Naom A Manella and Zeev Zohar’s book Play Unconventional Chess and Win in which it was coined, to indicate “challenging move”. “The symbol ^ does not represent the objective strength of a move (like ! or !!),” Mike explains, “but refers to the effect it has on the opponent. For this game, I think ^ is useful because while Rb4, Rd6 and Rg6 aren’t actually that good, they have a profound psychological effect and encourage James to go wrong.