A great result for the Club in the Major Cup Semi-Final at Cheddleton last night. Despite being outrated by 848 points we came away with a 3-2 win and will now meet Crewe in the Final on a date still to be arranged. The result was better than we could ever have imagined as we were without Ray, Glyn and Jay, so it was a bit of a makeshift team, with every one of us being outrated by our opponents.
Chris got us off to a great start with yet another excellent win on board 1, closely followed by a draw from Lea on board 4 against an opponent rated 230 point higher than him. Phil was then desperately unlucky to lose his game on board 5 against an opponent rated 400 points higher. Steve's game on board 2 then got quite complicated in the middle game but then petered out into a draw. This left us needing only a draw from Dylan on board 3 to take us through on the board count rule. With everybody biting their nails it was a really tense finish. Dylan was 2 pawns up but only had around 30 seconds on his clock. He then had to give up his 2 pawn advantage, leaving both players with a Pawn each - Dylan's on the King side and his opponent on the Queen side. Fortunately, Dylan had calculated correctly and promoted his Pawn with check. After several more checks he was able to prevent his opponent from advancing his own Pawn any further and the game was won, along with the match and without invoking the board count rule.
Congratulations to everybody on a great team effort.
Click here - https://ecflms.org.uk/lms/node/136433 - for the full match score card.