Friendly Match - lost against Bank Of Scotland

Crawford Macnab

11 July 2023

An away friendly match against Bank Of Scotland at the Ukranian Club.

Although outgraded on the top boards we narrowly lost 3 - 4.

This was our first match trying out the time control of 85 minutes with 10 second increment. Before the match, doing a quick check it did not look like the clocks had been set correctly. As the clocks are the same ones we use, I recalled that mode 18 was what we used to manually set the clock to play with an increment. It only took a few moments to configure all the clocks correctly!

I think the general concensus was that the increment worked ok.

	Bank Of Scotland		Bank Of Scotland		Civil Service		Civil Service
1	Volodymyr Tushynskyi	2268*	1 - 0	Crawford T Macnab	1760
2	Mike Chisholm	1958	½ - ½	Charles Gunn-Russell	1718
3	David Stewart	1668	0 - 1	Eric Smith	1601
4	Alistair Forbes	1567	1 - 0	Simon Bate	1506
5	Graeme Russell	1480	1 - 0	Patrick Miller	1413
6	James Turner	1408	½ - ½	João Reis	1410*
7	Krishan Paterson	1349*	0 - 1	William Lindved
				4 - 3

Simon was first to finish losing against Alistair Forbes.

On the bottom board new member William Lindved had a great debut winning with the white pieces against Krishan Paterson. Having won a knight he safely swapped rooks off to convert in the endgame.

Patrick had lost a few pawns and despite best efforts to create tactical counterplay the result was not in doubt.

João reached a complicated closed position against James Turner and it did not look like there was enough time to double rooks on the h file due to his opponent having a passed e pawn. A draw was agreed.

I managed to reach a decent position with the white pieces in a quiet Italian formation against Volodymyr Tushynskyi. Later black managed to activate his rook and the position shown was reached. Down to less than a minute on the clock I speculated that my last chance was to exchange my rook for his knight and try for a perpetual check with the queen supported by the bishop. With a bit more time the perpetual was relatively simple to achieve but unfortunately I let the black king escape to the queenside and lost. (Volodymyr confirmed the perpetual afterwards)

Eric had a time advantage against David Stewart who was down to under a minute left on the clock. Eric kept the position complicated and a few weaker moves led to a winning advantage with his opponent losing on time.

Mike and Charles reached a blockaded position where Mike had a space advantage and a more active knight that allowed him to probe for a potential breakthrough. Charles had to be patient and not let any knight sacrifices lead to a queening pawn. Drawn.

An enjoyable match agaict the Bank of Scotland at the Ukranian club.