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The Four Nations League is a team tournament over three divisions, with over 850 players
registered to take part and over £10,000 in cash prizes on offer. It is the most prestigious
team chess event held in the United Kingdom. It is held over various weekends from
Oct to May 2013/14, in several venues (for the 2013/14 season).
Little did I expect when I drove up to Hinckley Island on the Saturday how much drama I was to meet with that day. Even before the chess got underway, as it happened.
My previous visits to Hinckley Island had been trouble-free as regards hotel arrangements, but this one was more colourful. For starters, they had no record of my booking. This had been made for me by Dave Welch so I had to check with him that it had been done, and of course it had. It transpired that the hotel, in its infinite wisdom, had decided that all the various official 4NCL people had duly arrived on the Friday and that nobody could possibly be coming on Saturday (despite this being clearly signalled in my booking) so my reservation had been re-routed to the digital wastebasket.
So they had then had to register me all over again and find me a room – thankfully, not a problem, the receptionist told me. Or was it? I was allocated room 503. I went to where she told me room 503 was located, and found myself looking at a blank wall between rooms 502 and 504. Did the numbers alternate with those on the opposite side of the corridor, maybe? No, there was a large laundry room there and no sign of a room 503. I briefly contemplated bedding down in the laundry room, which did look quite cosy with all those fluffy towels. I also considered putting my faith in the existence of room 503 and driving my wheeled suitcase in determined fashion at the wall between 502 and 504 but that sort of thing only works in children’s stories.
I traipsed back to reception. Interestingly, two callow hotel staff tried to persuade me that there really was a room 503 but a third (evidently more knowledgable) ruefully agreed with me and proceeded to allocate a room number that came with a door and a physical space beyond. I later learnt that this same room had earlier been rejected by other 4NCL guests as it had a defective window through which a gale-force draught had blown through. But I don’t care about draughts as I’m a chessplayer.
Enough of the perpendicular pronoun, you cry – what about the chess? Oh alright, then...
Division 1, Championship Pool: Piling Up Game Points
4NCL pairings are of course rigged to keep the really big pairings to the very end, so part of the fun is finding out which super-GMs the big battalions – these days Guildford 1 and Wood Green 1 – are going to deploy on the final weekend. There can be a fair amount of industrial espionage, with the weapon of chessboard destruction is kept back for the final round but may still be spotted lurking somewhere in the hotel.
Alexei Shirov |
Luke McShane |
Maxime Vachier-Lagrave |
This year the two team managers, Roger Emerson of Guildford and Brian Smith of Wood Green, seemed fairly relaxed about the names in their frames. It was known from the start of the weekend that Wood Green would later be deploying Alexei Shirov (who could be seen about the hotel) and Luke McShane (who came later). However, I think we were in the dark about the imminent arrival of MVL – as Maxime Vachier-Lagrave is generally known. Of course, it could have all have been a bluff: for all I or anybody else knew there could really have been a secret room 503 somewhere with Magnus Carlsen or Vishy Anand in it.
Although both major teams heavily outrated their round nine opposition, it was of course vital to pile up as many game points as possible in order to secure draw odds for the round 11 show-down. As we left things last time, both leaders were on a maximum 8 match points but Wood Green edged Guildford by a single game point.
Let’s consider each match in turn.
Wood Green 1 6-2 Grantham Sharks: Guildford 1 had finished their match in advance of this one, and Wood Green 1 needed to match their score as closely as possible in order to maintain their slender game point lead. David Howell’s was the last game to finish as he endeavoured to eke out a win against Ameet Ghasi. He didn't quite succeed but a draw was enough to give Wood Green a half game point edge over Guildford. The costliest result in this match for Wood Green was Pia Cramling’s calamitous loss against the 18-year-old English player Peter Batchelor, who did very well to exploit the Swedish GM’s time trouble by posing her a few tactical puzzles in ascending order of difficulty.
Jon Speelman (above) dealt severely with Veronica Foisor:
Overall this was a pretty effective job by a team with an average rating of 2606 up against one averaging 2310, but the London side could have done with something nearer a maximum 8-0 to maximise their edge over Guildford. As it turned out, their game point advantage was cut to just a half game point.
Anish Giri on board one |
Robin van Kampen on board six |
Guildford 1 6½-1½ White Rose: Guildford bolstered their team with two Dutchmen, Anish Giri on top board and Robin van Kampen on board six, and it gave them enough firepower to score a big win against White Rose. As always, the interest came on the boards where the more fancied team did not win.
Sue Maroroa (above), playing against her hubby Gawain’s team and following in the distinguished footsteps of Bob Wade and Murray Chandler in becoming a Kiwi-turned-Brit, played extremely well to defeat GM Mark Hebden. It was her first GM scalp.
Guildford 2 4-4 Cheddleton: this was an important match for the minor places, with Cheddleton managing to edge past Grantham Sharks 1 into fourth position. On top board for Guildford 2, Spanish FM Alberto Suarez Real was (according to his team manager) content to cruise to an IM norm with three draws if need be, but he was up against Jonathan Hawkins who needed a win for a GM norm. Consequently the Spaniard’s early peace offer was declined. However, as so often where one side is straining too hard to win, it was the player offering the pipe of peace who triumphed, and rather beautifully.
Jonathan Hawkins
There was an interesting clash between England’s most successful junior and senior players of the moment on the third board. Youth triumphed over experience in a very tense encounter. This win left Yang-Fan needing a win against a 2380+ opponent in round ten for a ten-round GM norm.
Keith Arkell
e2e4.org.uk 6½-1½ Barbican 2: perhaps feeling lonely in the Championship section without their first team, Barbican lost by rather a large margin. Their two bottom boards gave them a degree of respectability, with 15-year-old English girl player Naomi Wei winning against Lithuanian-registered but long-time English resident Rasa Norinkeviciute.
Division 1, Championship Pool after Round 9
Wood Green 1 10(32), Guildford 1 10(31½), White Rose 6(20), Cheddleton 5(18½), Grantham Sharks 1 4(18), e2e4.org.uk 3(15), Guildford 2 2(14½), Barbican 2 0(10½).
Division 1, Demotion Pool, Round 9
Grantham Sharks 2 and King’s Head came into the weekend with demotion a virtual certainty, but only Barbican 1 could be entirely confident of not being one of the two teams which joined them on the way down. King’s Head defaulted two boards so that was a head start for 3Cs on their way to a 6½-0 victory. Oxford also defaulted a board and were soundly drubbed by Barbican 1 to the tune of 7-½, one plus factor for Oxford being the draw against GM Turner achieved by Justin Tan on top board, thus keeping him chugging along on his way to a norm. Grantham Sharks 2 turned up with their full complement of players but may as well have stayed at home as they were wiped out 0-8 by Blackthorne Russia, who, in seeking to ensure that they did not drop a division, were significantly strengthened by the inclusion in their side of experienced Russian GM Konstantin Landa.
That meant that the only closely contested match of the round in this pool was Wood Green 2 versus Cambridge University, which ended 4½-3½ in the first-named team’s favour.
Division 1, Demotion Pool after Round 9
Barbican 1 10(29), Wood Green 2 8(24), Oxford 6(18½), 3Cs 6(25), Blackthorne Russia 6(24½), Cambridge University 4(18), Kings Head 0(19½), Grantham Sharks 2 0(9).
– Part two of John Saunders' report will follow soon –
John Cameron Saunders, 61, graduated in Law and Classics from Cambridge University in the mid-1970s. He has a Welsh father and Scottish mother, hence should be referred to as 'British' rather than 'English'. He claims that his most outstanding achievement was making the lowest score on bottom board for Wales, the country which finished last in the 1997 European Team Championship. In the late 1990s he successfully plotted an escape from a very long term of imprisonment (20 years) as an IT professional, changing career to chess editing and writing. He became the BBC Ceefax teletext service's chess columnist in 1998 and editor/webmaster of 'British Chess Magazine' in 1999. In the past he has been the webmaster for the 4NCL and the English Chess Federation (for whom he also once edited their house magazine 'ChessMoves'). In 2007 he wrote and had published a richly-illustrated hardback book for beginners – "How to Play Winning Chess", ISBN 978-0754817123 – available at an extremely reasonable price from many online stockists. So far he has failed to persuade the manager of his own company's chess shop to stock copies.
LinksYou can use ChessBase 12 or any of our Fritz compatible chess programs to replay the games in PGN. You can also download our free Playchess client, which will in addition give you immediate access to the chess server Playchess.com. |
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