First team drew with Edinburgh 3
Crawford Macnab
17 February 2025
A tight 3 - 3 draw against Edinburgh 3 for the first team.
| Civil Service 1 | Civil Service 1 | Edinburgh 3 | Edinburgh 3 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Charles Gunn-Russell | 1751 | ½ - ½ | A David Archibald | 1784 | ||
| 2 | Allan McDiarmid | 1750 | 0 - 1 | Ivar Bundulis | 1723 | ||
| 3 | Crawford T Macnab | 1696 | ½ - ½ | Mark Gyalus | 1730 | ||
| 4 | Euan McDiarmid | 1659 | 1 - 0 | Berislav Marusic | 1714 | ||
| 5 | Richard Scott | 1657 | 1 - 0 | Martin Brejter | 1690 | ||
| 6 | Eric P Smith | 1589 | 0 - 1 | Colin J Hutchison | 1662 | ||
| 3 - 3 | |||||||
Both teams quite evenly matched, though we were slightly outgraded on all boards.
Charles finished his game relatively quickly with a solid draw against David Archibald on board 1.
On board 3 both sides castled on the queenside and although I had control of the open f file it was difficult to see a safe way forward so I accepted the draw offer.
Euan had slightly awkward placement of his pieces out of the opening but managed to find a nice tactic, in response to which his opponent decided to drop the exchange with some potential compensation due to central pawns. His opponent probably did not find the best plan and later made a further mistake allowing Euan to finish the game off.
Richard had appeared to be in a bit of potential trouble with his opponent lining up the major pieces against his king although his opponents king was itself a bit exposed and Richard had two good bishops. I later glanced over to see Richard delivering a checkmate!
At this stage we were guaranteed to at least draw the match with Allan and Eric still to finish.
Prior to this Allan had declined a draw offer deciding to play on with possibly a very slight edge, but unfortunately his opponents queenside pawns proved to be strong and Allan lost.
Eric was a pawn up in an ending where both sides had K+R+N+Ps. It looked like Eric’s plan of promoting his queen rook pawn was going to succeed but his opponents rook and knight were active around his king. To complicate matters the clock appeared to not add the extra 15 minutes on for his opponent which may have distracted Eric. Disaster struck when Eric moved his king on to the h1 corner square that allowed an unusual forced checkmate with just the rook and knight!
A good 3 - 3 result in the end but felt like a missed match win.