Ocelots off the mark!

Tuesday 16 October, 2018

The Ocelots (our 4th team) notched up their first match point of the season, with a win against visitors Albany!

Captain Andrew Medworth reports:

“I’m pleased to announce that last night Hendon 4 scored our first match win of the season, beating Albany 1 at home by a 5-3 score.

Albany were not able to field a full team, and defaulted on three boards. It turned out that we needed that head-start, because on the remaining five boards, we actually lost 3-2!

Albany won the toss and unsurprisingly chose White on the odd boards, giving us Black in three out of the five games. David Levy drew quickly on Board 2, meaning we only needed another point on the other four to win the match.

I thought we had worse positions on Boards 3, 4 and 5 at this point, with Oren and Julian being one or two pawns down and Josh coming under some pressure, but Board 1 looked fairly level. Unfortunately, though, Jason succumbed to an attack and lost. Soon afterwards, Oren had to resign as well, as his exposed king plus his opponent’s extra material proved too much.

I was quite worried at this point, but thankfully Josh was able to reach a rook ending which was at least level (behind on the clock, but his opponent did not try to flag him) and Julian actually managed to catch Chris Todd out and win.

A bit more nerve-wracking than I would have liked, but the important thing is we won in the end! Many thanks to everyone for playing! Thanks also to Adam, Anthony and Petr for agreeing to drop out.

The next Hendon 4 match is on Monday 5th November, away at Ealing. We have a match every week in November, so I hope I can continue to count on your support to get through that busy period!”