The latest January grading list has been published here.
Notably our most promising player, Matthew Gazes, has again increased remarkably since the last rating list, with his rating now a very respectable 180, an increase of 17 points.
Everyone else has remained roughly the same as they were on the July 2015 rating list. (We clearly aren’t working hard enough).
This year saw the 6th edition of the Len Hammond Memorial, the annual friendly match between Snodland and local rivals Maidstone.
Len was an active and well liked member of both clubs and is fondly remembered. Match results below.
Maidstone Vs Snodland
David Munford 0 Vs 1 Matt Bunn
David Heath 1 Vs Default
Barry Beavis 1 Vs 0 George Hollands
Bob Lane 1/2 Vs 1/2 David Fowler
Saba Mustafa 1 Vs 0 Rob Thompson
Chris Ilinca 1 Vs 0 David Lettington
Douglas Smith 0 Vs 1 Pete Hickey
Nigel Osina 1 Vs 0 Neil Miners
Peter Dirmanskas 0 Vs 1 Richard Mallery
Back in December Snodland visited Weald of Kent in the en-passant cup.
Peter Hickey has kindly sent us his game which can be viewed, along with some light annotation by myself here.
Snodland have played three recent matches, including a 4-0 win against Maidstone in the Tom Fuller. A draw and a loss in the En-Passant competition took some shine off our previous four wins in this league but should see us qualify for the business end of this year’s competition, the semi finals.
Last night Snodland traveled to Tunbridge Wells for our first En Passant match of the 2014/15 season. We came away with an excellent win, remaining unbeaten in the process!
The following results are available from rounds 1 & 2 of the qualifying phase. There’s still some places in the new look, double round A-League available to fight for.
Ok, so my previous post has been up for a while, I hope you all took the time to try and calculate like you would in a real game! I suspect if that was the case, you would just recapture on c3 and allow the arrow of time to take it’s course……. (This is what happened in the game, so don’t feel too disappointed if that was your choice, you just drew with a GM).
However, this is an excellent example of why we should always be alert and not just assume we should recapture. We all need to be concrete in our analysis and not be afraid of ghosts.
See the solution here and see how much looks familiar. Perhaps you had other ideas not mentioned in the solution (there are many lines further in that all win)?
In a new series of posts I will present a position for the more ambitious player to solve.
As usual, my advice is to set up the position on a board and try to calculate without moving the pieces. However this time give yourselves 40 minutes on the clock…
Below we have the game Gagunashvili – Zhang Zhong, Jakarta 2011. Black has just played 19…Nxc3 – How do you proceed as White?
