Gerry keeping his head while all around are losing theirs

Five players started round 2 of the club championships with a 100% record; Gerry is the only one left there after round 3 yielded more surprises.

Last night’s action was interesting from the very first move as Zdravko played Mihailo for the first time ever in a competitive game. He had been pondering opening choices in advance, with the problem, of course, that Mihailo was fairly familiar with Zdravko’s opening repertoire, through having been taught it or having played against it in friendlies for the past couple of years. So Zdravko dismissed his usual French game, being in no mood to face the exchange variation, decided against a Sicilian because Mihailo would be fairly comfortable with it and in the end decided to try get out of book straight away by playing 1. … b6.

The first game to finish wasn’t exactly a surprise. Mark has been first finished in each of the three rounds now (round 1 was on a technicality, when he had to pull out of the draw an hour in advance; the draw wasn’t redone and the result is down as a loss rather than a bye), while Eddie is Eddie. An hour was all it took for Eddie to record his first win of the tournament – it’s not that Mark was hammered in fairness; the game had progressed to an ending.

By this stage, Ger had sacced a piece for two pawns against Dylan, but hadn’t really gotten as much as he’d have liked out of it. Undaunted, he decided to repeat the trick and see if it worked this time. Now two pieces for four pawns down, Einstein’s saying was backed up by the time the game finished, with Dylan happy to blockade the pawns, leaving Ger with nothing to do but resign.

In general, though, the games were fairly close. Des on the bottom board had a walkover, but was playing William in a competitive friendly; he was cramped but level on material, while on 4, Ross and Anastasija – playing the wrong colours due to an error on my part in placing the name tags! – had swapped off all of two pawns each. Mihailo and Zdravko had symmetrical pawn structures, but of course, there was no chance either of them were going to offer a draw. John had an ok position against Desmond but then – strangely for him – spent 20 minutes on one move, which turned out to be quite weak and ultimately cost a pawn. Some of those 20 minutes, in fairness, were more than likely spent sleeping, given he’d flown in from America on the red-eye that morning and was now onto his 35th hour of being awake.

On the top two boards, Alex, who’d “merely” travelled up from Kilkenny earlier in the day for the game, was throwing pawns at Ciarán, who’d castled queenside and himself had an open h-file to attack Alex’s king, while against Gerry, I’d gone ten moves of theory playing the Classical Dutch for the first time but had subsequently erred by not playing … g5 to launch a kingside attack. Truth be told, I was looking at the move and would have played it ordinarily, but I figured if the move was wrong, a former Irish international, of all people, would very quickly show me up for it, so I chickened out, partly influenced by Gerry rather ominously recording his moves in a recording book entitled “My 99 Best Games”. I ended up making another mistake later on, giving Gerry two connected passed central pawns which steamrollered home – and about the first comment Gerry had after was that he thought I should have played g5…

In the final hour, the results started coming in with regularity. William had cramped Des out of first a pawn, then an exchange and finally the game. John, by now hallucinating pink elephants on the f3 square, dropped a second pawn and resigned when unable to stop Desmond’s mate in two threat. This somewhat surprised Desmond, who hadn’t got a mate in two threat at all; the queen “mate” could be parried by the simple RxQ. But the position was lost anyway and, as John noted afterwards, his own sleep deprivation shouldn’t take away from the fact that Desmond hardly put a piece wrong all game.

Higher up, Ross edged out Anastasija, while Zdravko swapped off to K+6 each against Mihailo, where the pawns were still symmetrical, but still no draw offer was forthcoming. They then reduced to K+3 each, with symmetrical locked pawns and neither king being able to invade, but still no draw offer was forthcoming. Just as I was about to step in to become maybe the first arbiter in the world to declare a draw based on five-fold repetition (new FIDE rule 9.6), Mihailo declared a draw based on three-fold repetition.

So as in round 1, seeds two and three dropped points, allowing Gerry to extend his lead over his expected title rivals. Instead, along with Mihailo, his main challengers were the fourth and fifth seeds, going head-to-head on board 2. Alex sacced a pawn to open up lines to Ciarán’s king, but then had to play h3 himself to avoid mate. In the pub analysis afterwards – which is, of course, usually Fritz-standard – we spotted a couple of f6 breaks which may have led to open lines for Ciarán, and potential rook sacs on h3, with nastiness to follow. However, Alex lined three major pieces down the open a-file, Ciarán lined up a couple of major pieces along the seventh rank to defend a7, both sides agreed they weren’t going to budge from that position and a draw was agreed.

So as we near the business end of things, Gerry has a clear lead and is up against a Manojlovic on board 1 – but not as might have been expected! Desmond and Mihailo have the lead in the grading prize stakes, though the number of byes in round 4 (five in total) mean things are likely to be quite congested come round 5. There’s a long way to go in this tournament yet!