Euro heartache for Benildus in Athlone

St Benildus missed out on a European Cup spot and a trip to Greece in October by the narrowest margin possible in the National Club Championships at the weekend.

Seeded fourth of eight teams, the challenge was to finish in the top three – and by looking at the ratings of the other teams, it was immediately obvious that the best way of doing this would be to avoid playing both Gonzaga and Dublin, who were respectively 250 and 120 points stronger per board than us; third seed Elm Mount, by contrast, were only ten points ahead of us, and had an uneven team headed up by their two titled players.

In round 1, we were up against bottom side Skerries, which went pretty much as expected. Brendan’s opponent sacced a queen and a piece, but it turned out to be nonsense and Brendan was won fairly soon after (though the game continued until mate). Vjekoslav also mated his opponent, who had missed the mate but was in big trouble anyway, while I had a nice King’s Gambit win, having reached a crushing bind inside the first ten moves.

Kevin added a fourth and ran down to catch the rugby, Gerry ground out a win in what at one stage was a tablebase R+P v R draw, and only Zdravko gave up a half point, settling for a draw when a pawn up but with an unclear position in mutual time pressure. Still, 6-0s are rare enough even in the NCC, and 5½ was pretty much the best start we could hope for.

Round 2 was tougher – Gonzaga. This also went as expected, although again the 6-0 win proved hard to come by (there was only one 6-0 all weekend, between the teams who finished in the bottom two.) The other matches were all half over by the time the first result came in in our match, but we did lose all the top five boards, and only I picked up a win on 6. This came about in slightly controversial circumstances, however. I had played reasonably well to reach this position as black –

This is a very tricky ending. It looks like black is just better – I’m a pawn up, and the bishop should be better than the knight with the pawns on opposite sides of the board. However, white has by far the more active pieces – especially the king – and has the most dangerous pawn too, the h-pawn. In fact, Fritz says that black is playing to hold the draw here; I have no way of winning. One interesting line is 1. … b6 2. Kd4 Re4+ 3. KxB RxP 4. NxP! PxR 5. Nc6+ Kb7 6. NxR PxN and the resulting pawn race is a draw.

Not realising any of this, I thought I was playing for a win, pushed too hard and ended up completely lost when my opponent’s king and knight cut off my bishop from the key white squares on the h-file. And so my opponent queened, and this position was reached –

This is obviously lost, but out of stubbornness, I wasn’t going to resign until after my a-pawn was gone. So I blocked the check with the bishop, and white took my pawn on b6 with check. As I considered my next move – Kc3, provided it didn’t lose any more material to forks – Ivan stepped in as controller and pointed out that 1. … Bc4 in the above position was actually check – which I had completely missed, being resigned to losing – and so white’s reply was an illegal move. He stopped the clocks to add two minutes to my time – which just annoyed me because, being about to resign, it was pointless – and then restarted the clocks with the comment that touch move also applied, and so white had to move his queen. Both of us fairly quickly saw what this meant – the only two legal moves were now the equally daft 1. QxB+ or Qd5.   Rather than play either, white resigned, technically having done so in a position which Fritz calls as forced mate!

So a solid start, but day 2 was to be the crunch day, and for it, we brought in Dylan and Ciarán for Kevin and myself. Round 3 had us up against Elm Mount – and curiously, we didn’t want to win. The vagaries of the draw meant that if we did win, we would almost certainly be up against Dublin in the last round; what we wanted instead was a 3½-2½ defeat or even a 3-3 draw, which would allow us drop down the draw a bit but keep within striking distance of third.

And as it turned out, that’s exactly how things panned out. Ciarán’s opening prep – on the French Winawer and the Caro-Kann – went out the window on move 1 as Alex Goss went in for 1. e4 e5 and the Scotch, which ended badly with his king hopelessly exposed, bereft of all its defensive pawns and with several major pieces pointing in its direction. Vjeko added a draw by perpetual when almost getting his opponent’s queen trapped, while Zdravko lost against David Fitzsimons on 2 and Gerry chanced a draw offer against his IM opponent on 1. Dylan kept us in it with an unfortunate defeat on 4, hanging a piece when overlooking an alternative capture – but this was fine because a match win would have been a bad result for us. Dylan ultimately lost, Brendan turned around a defensive double rook and pawn ending into an attacking rook and pawn one, and then a won king and pawn one, while the IM finally found a way to break down Gerry’s defences and claim a win.

Still, 3½-2½ was probably the best result we could have gotten. Back of the paper calculations said we would have seventh seeds Ballinasloe if we lost, and fifth seeds Blanchardstown if we drew – and those were proven accurate when the final round draw gave us Ballinasloe. We had beaten the Galway side 5-1 en route to qualifying last year, and a week later had beaten them 7-1 in the final round of the leagues to claim the Heidenfeld title. Here, the two teams were more evenly matched than in those two previous meetings – the expected score was 4-2 to us – but the maths were still in our favour.   We just needed Elm Mount and Blanch to lose to Gonzaga and Dublin on the top two boards, and then a 4½-1½ win for us combined with a 6-0 win for Trinity against Skerries – who only had one point – would leave us and Trinity level on match points and game points.   Not having played each other – which was the second tie-break – a check revealed that the third tie-break was sum of opponents’ scores, in which we had the edge. Any points dropped by Trinity against Skerries would reduce our required score. And a draw or defeat for us would see Ballinasloe qualify.

What we didn’t then need in all this, of course, was for Brendan to come over to me 20 minutes in and ask if he could take a draw; his opponent had a probable perpetual. It was of course way too early to settle for draws, so Brendan had to try a dodgy line to avoid the perpetual, which saw his king wide open, but his knight on a1, where it had at least taken a rook.

Vjeko also had a dodgy start; having brought out the Budapest Gambit, white played the highly unusual 4. Qd4 – as any King’s Gambit player will know, it’s always a danger playing sharp lines against lower rated players that they’ll simply deviate from book very early, leaving you on your own wondering how to capitalise!

This is already a very sharp position; Vjekoslav eventually played 4. … h5, which Fritz gives as +1 for white. The correct move – 1½ pawns better – appears to lose, but for a nice trap – 4. … d6! 5. ed BXP 6. Qxg7?? (D)

Here, 6. … Be5 traps white’s queen on a wide-open board. This is the move Vjekoslav missed on move 4, and so found himself already facing a worse position.

A couple of hours in, and things were beginning to become clearer. Ciarán had picked up another handy win against a 1300 on the bottom board – we ended up on 4/4 there over the weekend – and Elm Mount and Blanch were starting to struggle as hoped. And better news came when Trinity wound up R+4 v R+1 down in one of their games. This would reduce our required score to just 3½-2½ – provided Elm Mount lost by at least 4-2 against Gonzaga – but then nerve-wracking things started happening. In this position –

– Skerries (white) uncorked 1. Rf6??…which is a draw! To go from +20 to drawn in a single move meant that we would now require an extra half point to qualify, but play continued 1. … RxR+ 2. PxR+ Kf8 3. Kf5 KxP 4. a3 a4 5. Ke5 Ke8?? – a really basic endgame blunder which loses immediately, and meant that our required score was 3½ after all!

Dublin had soon racked up a 4-0 lead against Blanchardstown, while Elm Mount weren’t going to get the 2½ they required to increase our required score, and so it all came down to us and Ballinasloe. Vjekoslav had to settle for a draw after coming out of the opening clearly worse, while Zdravko did the same thing. Gerry was pushing in a rook and pawn ending where the main factor was likely to be his passed a-pawn, while Brendan was just starting to unravel his position and was a rook up, and Dylan was slightly worse but nothing else. With a 2-1 lead, we still needed 1½/3 from the final games – but Ballinsloe knew 2/3 would see them qualify, so we could be sure there would be no easy points.

Then things started to go wrong. Brendan fell for a perpetual – his opponent having declined a perpetual much earlier of course – and we needed 1/2. Gerry couldn’t make any headway as his passed pawn was stuck on a7, was defended from the side and attacked from a5, so he too had to settle for a draw. It now all came down to Dylan, who had somewhere along the line dropped a pawn. The position of R, B+3 v R, B+2 was maybe holdable, but it was tricky – and then in time trouble, Dylan saw a ghost of a draw, swapped the pieces off, missed a zwischenzug, and found he had a completely lost king and pawn ending.

And so despite having worked the draw in our favour for a second year in a row, it’s the second bottom seeds – who avoided both Gonzaga and Dublin! – who will be heading off to Greece in the autumn with the two sides they avoided playing, while we think about what might have been…   Had we picked up a half point extra in any of the five games we didn’t win, we would have been dead level with Trinity, and it’s actually unclear what would have happened then. The tie-break given on the ICU site indicates that we would actually still have only come fourth, although we had been advised of a different tie-break before the start of the round. The exact tie-breaks calculated are worked out as follows –

So had Gerry won instead of drawing, we would have picked up an extra 50 tie-break points – still not enough to catch Trinity, effectively by virtue of our 4/4 on board 6; Trinity by contrast scored 1/8 on the bottom two boards. Had we won 4½-1½, this would have seen us qualify on game points.

Still, it’s only a game! 2019’s NCC is in Leinster, and the ECC is in the beautiful Montenegrin city of Budva. We’ll be taking places on the team the same way as this year – rating order based on the rating list published immediately after entries open. What better excuse to try get your rating up over the next year?!