First team drew with Pentland Hills 1
Crawford Macnab
20 January 2025
The first league match against Pentland Hills finished as a draw at 3 - 3.
| Civil Service 1 | Civil Service 1 | Pentland Hills 1 | Pentland Hills 1 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Charles Gunn-Russell | 1751 | ½ - ½ | Philip N Best | 1905 | ||
| 2 | Allan McDiarmid | 1750 | 1 - 0 | Ian C Morrison | 1774 | ||
| 3 | Crawford T Macnab | 1696 | 1 - 0 | Brendan A Cornes | 1754 | ||
| 4 | Richard Scott | 1657 | 0 - 1 | David Begg | 1669 | ||
| 5 | Eric P Smith | 1589 | ½ - ½ | Adam Dickinson | 1663 | ||
| 6 | Douglas S Heatlie | 1481 | 0 - 1 | Victor Thimonier | 1592 | ||
| 3 - 3 | |||||||
For while it looked like we were going to lose this match.
Douglas played up as a reserve on bottom board but before long had a losing position after he unsoundly sacrificed his queen for a bishop!
I think Eric faced 1.b4 and an early a5 pawn push saw his queen venture out quite early. In the end a draw was agreed.
On board one Charles had the black pieces against Philip Best who ventured the Evans gambit line of the Guicco Piano. Not an opening you see very often these days and Charles responded well with exchanges leading to a level endgame where moves were repeated.
On board three I played a Nc6 Pirc defence which led to opposite side castling and white attacking by advancing th h4 pawn. When it was clear that a queenside attack for me would be too slow I chose to be patient and play for a defensive pawn blockade letting white decide how (and if) to sacrifice to progress his attack. How to breakthrough was not obvious for white and both players ran low on time with about 10 moves still to make with less than a minute on the clocks. White had switched to pushing his central pawns that opened the position giving black a chance to attack the white king. With the position being a little easier to play for black, white eventually lost on time with the advantage switching to black.
On board two Allan had a good win with the white pieces where he appeared to be in control out of the opening. With the black squared bishop swapped off for a knight, the black squares became weak around the black king which led to Allan winning a rook for minor piece. White having a few extra pawns in the end could exchange off rooks and minor pieces to leave a won king and pawn ending.
This left the match score at 3-2 in our favour with Richard the last board to finish. Unfortunately he was a pawn down in an endgame where he had to swap off his defensive bishop for his opponents knight allowing two passed pawns that coould not be stopped.