Could we go one better than last year’s 3-3 draw with Viking of Iceland was the question we ended yesterday’s report with. The answer? An emphatic no.
A bit about the venue first though. We’ve gradually weeded the “Unlike Turkey…” comments out – except when waiting half an hour for a pint of course – and are starting to warm to the place. The playing hall, for example, is nicer than Turkey –
This to an extent is a factor of it being a much bigger tournament – 73 teams compared to 48 last year – and it means a grander hall is of course required. A banner in the corner notes the flags of all the players involved, although Constantin isn’t particularly impressed with their German effort –
Outside the hall is the hotel marina where there’s the odd nice yacht –
This one costs €56,000,000 – or Brendan has suggested we try hire it for a mere €200,000 for the week.
Even the desserts are better here than T…than last year, which looked great but were a bit bland. This year’s selection taste much better, and will almost certainly lead to the eight of us coming home a stone heavier than we left Dublin. They also come with a large decoratively-carved watermelon beside them –
(We could make some other watermelon jokes here – some things stay on tour, but those on tour will know what I’m talking about!)
If you do feel peckish between three rounds of all-you-can-eat buffet, there is a supermarket on the hotel grounds, but the bread aisle is as stocked up as an Irish supermarket when there’s a bit of snow on the way –
I was putting my feet up today after my exploits yesterday; it was coincidentally the nicest day of the week so far –
– but that still meant we were going into bat with our strongest line-up of the tournament so far. We had drawn with our opponents, Viking of Iceland, last year, but they had since added a 2400, while we had lost Gerry and Mihailo, so our expected score had dropped to 1.2. But while a match draw was probably unlikely, we were still looking to chase game points to try keep us away from the dreaded bye. That, however, is not how things went, and a disastrous afternoon saw us 5-0 down inside three hours, when most other games only had two or, at most, three games finished. William was first down – having gone through prep as far as move 11, he lost on move 14. How does white finish this one off?
1. Rxf7 does the job – 1. … KxR 2. QxP+ Kf8 3. Bh6#. William had missed that 1. … BxB allowed 2. QxP#. Best now is 1. … h5, but it’s still forced mate. So it was 1-0 very early on; this was the third game of 220 to finish; in fact, the controllers had barely finished their cheating scans when the game was over; they pass by everyone quietly with a handheld metal box with antenna checking for transmitting wifi devices, but presumably they just looked at William’s board, realised he certainly wasn’t cheating, and moved on.
Not that others were too far behind. Kevin got to this position after 18 moves of an Alekhine-Chatard attack; what killer blow does white deliver now?
1. Bxh5! pretty much wins on the spot. It certainly does after Kevin’s response – 1. … Ke7 2. Qc7+ Kf8 3. BxP 1-0. But other replies are equally bad, although Kevin did redeem himself by talking Fritz through the various permutations – it thinks the sac is interesting until Kevin started pointing out what he’d seen at the board, at which point Fritz goes “Oh yeah”, and agrees. A sample is 1. … RxB 2. NxR PxN 3. RxP Nd4 (threatening mate) 4. RxN QxB 5. Qd6+ Kg7 6. Qd8 Kg6 7. g4 and mate, or 1. … PxB 2. g6 and again you can pretty much resign.
John – who’s working on an academic paper between rounds – had a bit of a mare against an English opponent who his teammates reckoned was motivated by playing the Irish (see last year’s encounter!). Anyways, he too lost relatively early, although being John, he did at least manage 31 moves.
So we had gotten thumped in the three blacks, but the three whites – Dylan, Brendan and Constantin were going ok. Until, that is, each threw their game away in one move. Constantin was first up, accepting a piece sac when he could have just restored material equality by taking a pawn elsewhere. Brendan also went wrong in one go, while Dylan close on had a fortress when he went and nabbed a pawn, which quickly led to a horrible position where he had a perpetual pin on his only remaining piece and was in complete zugswang –
Here, 1. Kg2 f6 2. h3 e5 and white has literally no moves – so Dylan sacced on h4 instead, which is just a trivial win for black.
So our first ever European whitewash, and a proper bump back to earth after our heroics of the past two days. By performance rating, this is our worst ever European performance – overtaking, bizarrely, our only European win, 5½-½ against Hatay last year. This is based on the 6-0 being 400 points lower-rated than Viking, while Hatay were so low-rated that our 5½-½ win was only good enough for a 1785 performance. (For the record, between this year and last year, our overall performance rating is 4 above our average rating)
Tomorrow we face a huge tie against Welsh side White Knights, with the losers almost guaranteed the bye on Tuesday. They’re the seed immediately above us, so we’ll be giving less than 50 points per board. The two other Irish sides face Danish teams tomorrow, which will be juicy given the controversy in the football last night, which both us and Dublin were streaming separately –