Simul vs. IM Alexander Matros

Friday 23rd October saw a simultaneous chess event held in Lancaster University Management School - the second to be held in Lancaster in the space of a month! IM Alexander Matros, a professor at the school, took on 18 challengers.

Most of the challengers were students on the MBA program in LUMS - as such, this was intended to be a promotional event from them. Nevertheless, a few members of the chess society got spots, so myself, Ian and a duel combination of Kshitij and Alkis played 3 of the games. Ian has also blogged about the event; you can find his blog and game here:

http://www.chess.com/blog/Shi_Tou/a-draw-with-an-im---first-time

The MBA students proved to be worse than useless - they were mostly dead lost after about 10 moves but some of them kept playing, refusing to move when asked to by IM Matros and even questioning his knowledge on the rules of chess in some circumstances. Quite what this behaviour says about the humility of MBA students, I will leave to the reader to infer.

The upside of the event being held by the Management School was that food and drink were in excellent supply! Nibbles were brought round to the players, and alcohol was also on offer. I confess to having a beer during the game.

At any rate, the four of us from the chess society gave the IM some good games. We all managed to be awarded draws! Granted, the IM was slightly better in all three games, but rather than push for a win for some more time, he conceded draws as the time was getting quite late! I noticed he took a lot more time to make his moves than GM Davies did in my last simul.

Here's the game. It was a tough one where I had to give up my queen for a rook and knight at one point, but it's not so easy to break Black down in the final position.

I was obviously pleased to get the draw and take my simul record to 1.5/2! IM Matros was gracious in conceding the draws to us. Overall, it was a good event - hopefully another one will be held at some point!