First team start season with a draw!
Crawford Macnab
13 October 2025
Our first foray back in the Premier Division was against the champions from two seasons ago so it was always going to be a tough start.
We managed a credible 3 - 3 draw which was a great result given we were outgraded on every board.
| Civil Service 1 | Civil Service 1 | Edinburgh West 1 | Edinburgh West 1 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Marcel Van Oijen | 1936 | 0 - 1 | Rithvik Deepak Ambattu | 2011 | ||
| 2 | Euan McDiarmid | 1812 | 1 - 0 | Neil R Farrell | 2166 | ||
| 3 | Charles Gunn-Russell | 1789 | ½ - ½ | Devesh Sharma | 1925 | ||
| 4 | Crawford T Macnab | 1729 | ½ - ½ | Palaniswamy Raja Selvaraj | 1943 | ||
| 5 | Richard Scott | 1702 | 1 - 0 | Tristan I Del Mar | 1837 | ||
| 6 | Eric P Smith | 1574 | 0 - 1 | Martin E Robinson | 1762 | ||
| 3 - 3 | |||||||
Eric was first to finish in a short game where he played a Bc4, Ng5 and Nxf7 line in an e4 e5 opening. It looked like Black countered this well and it was Eric’s king that was more exposed. There was no checkmate but the queens came off and when the dust settled, black had a significant advantage in material.
In my game both sides castled queen side with white having more central space, black had well organised pieces. After 18 moves my opponent offered a draw that was accepted. (I suspect he looked at the position on the other boards and at the time it looked like Edinburgh West were doing well on all boards, he was also getting low on time)
Charles was playing against the strong junior Devesh Sharma who played the four knights opening with a 4.h3 line that Charles hadn’t faced before. The game is shown below and you can see that black played 13..Nc4 (the engine prefers Qf6) which led to a pawn loss though Charles managed to find the nice Re4 and Rf4 resources that minimised the damage. After exchanges the pawn advantage was a doubled pawn and the opposite bishops led to a drawn endgame.
On top board Marcel was playing against 11 year old Rithvik Deepak Ambattu who was recently awarded the Candidate Master title by FIDE. In a Sicilian Defence white appeared to be always in control and calmy dealt with some pressure black tried to create down the open g file.
This left the score at 3 - 1 to Edinburgh West with two games still to finish.
Euan reached a complex position where his opponent (graded +354 points higher) had a strongly placed white square bishop and pressure against the white rook on a1. There was some compensation in that the black king was the more exposed with threats on the black squares. After the time control was reached Euan opened lines against the black king with g4 supported by his rook which had sought shelter on g1. There may have been a drawish line for black that swapped the queens off but that was not played and Euan broke through with a nice winning attack.
Richard was the last to finish and having endured a lot of early pressure from his opponent an endgame was reached where he had a king, rook and multiple passed pawns against a king, two knights and an advanced white pawn on the sixth rank. One approach might have been to try and swap the rook for white’s only passed pawn and rely on promoting one of the passed pawns but instead Richard decided to push his own passed pawns while delaying the need to sacrifice his rook only when (and if) the pawn promoted to a queen. White’s only chance would have been to use his knights to shield the black rook from being able to take the pawn. In the end white dropped a knight and the position was lost as he ran out of time.
 |  | |  | | |  | |
 | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | |
| | | | |  | | |
| |  |  | | | | |
 | | | | | | | |
| | | | | | | |
| |  |  | | | | |