Whilst the result looks impressive, the match was well fought.
First to finish was Marc whose opponent didn’t show.
Raymon opened with the Sokolsky and had an edge throughout which he converted to an exchange up and slowly increased his advantage of 2 rooks against rook and knight winning several pawns. The game concluded when the knight was lost.
Richard had a tough game against an old adversary in Ted Brown. A closed Sicilian resulted in slow manoeuvring with a semi blocked centre and black attempting to gain space on the queenside. The game ended abruptly when Ted blundered a piece.
Mike played his usual Philidor defence (?) resulting in a very early exchange of queens and moving to rook, knight and pawns ending. Peter had doubled pawns on the queenside so Mike pushed hard for a win in the resulting rook ending. According to Mike: “I played an odd (and I thought good) and seeming passive rook move, allowing his rook on my 7th rank. The point of this was to leave his rook passively placed once it had invaded and won a pawn, in order that I could make progress. I went on to decide that the idea was flawed just after I played it. Steve thought my position was lost, I thought it might be dodgy but perhaps not lost. Thinking about it now though, I am not sure its a bad position at all. As it happened I let my own rook loose along the c file, and the game looked balanced. Then my opponent made a weak move and eventually lost.”
Steve opened with a Trompowsky exchanged bishop for knight early and advancing in the centre to gain space with d5. He obtained a good position which he knows well and held an edge throughout with Adrian unable to find a secure place for his king. As Steve himself said “I played a decentish game, built up a good edge, then a very good edge and then Adrian put his rooks on e5 and g5 allowing f4!”