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The critical round took place in a spectacular location – the Town Hall of the beautiful north German trade city of Lübeck. The two leading teams in the German Bundesliga, the SG Solingen and SV Lübeck, played the decisive match against each other on Sunday morning. It was clear that, with two rounds still to go, it would be the winner of this encounter that would take the German team championship.
Lübeck is the shooting-star team in the German chess circuit. Sponsored by Galaxis, the manufacturers of digital settop boxes, Lübeck has a large number of international superstars, with Alexei Shirov on board one. But it is mainly the British players who have brought Lübeck to the top of the German team championship. In the absence of Shirov and Bareev, both of whom were playing in Monaco, it was left to Michael Adams, Jon Speelman, Julian Hodgeson, John Nunn and Stewart Conquest to bring home the trophy. And bring it home they did.
Nunn vs Lobron
The first critical game to end was the encounter John Nunn vs Eric Lobron. John had won his previous three games for the team, and Galaxis boss Wilfried Klimek could hardly hope for a fourth full point in succession. But just over three hours into the round Klimek got his present from the oldest player on his team. "John is the very greatest," he exclaimed. "Three years ago he joined our team in the second league, he helped us to promote to the first division, and now he is probably key to us winning the championship."
Adams vs Kasimdzhanov
Two hours later it was a fact. Speelman had lost to Jussupow, but Epishin had beaten Nikolic. All other games were drawn, so that Lübeck went into the decisive lead in this championship. Now barring a practically inconceivable loss to a much weaker team Lübeck has it all wrapped up for this season.
While the round was still in progress, but after his win over Eric Lobron, John Nunn sat down with us and annotated some of his recent games. His remarks and explanations were videotaped and will appear at a multimedia report in the next issue of ChessBase Magazine. They represent a wonderful lessons in chess thinking and strategy. A sample is given in the annotated game Nunn-Lobron below. Naturally it does not include the video footage, but John's remarks have been faithfully transcribed and are included as text annotation. Note that you can click any position in the notation to jump to the relevant position on our Javascript board.
