Wandering Dragons 4 v Edinburgh West 2, 2012-12-12

My game in the Edinburgh league (3rd division) against Steven Goodall of Wandering Dragons D. So far this season I have three wins and one spectacular loss.

The Edinburgh league is fun, and gives a few hundred chess players something to do on winter evenings, which are long and dark in Scotland. Matches take place using plastic pieces on roll-out boards in chilly church halls and chilly community centres and, in this case, a chilly Polish military officers' club. The exception is the main Edinburgh Chess Club, where matches take place in a Victorian flat in the West End, using nice wooden sets, surrounded by portraits of grandmasters, antique ivory chessmen in glass cases, and cabinets full of trophies - including the trophy from the London-Edinburgh correspondence game that named the Scotch Gambit - and you can feel the history pressing at you from all sides, and it is very chilly.

I warm myself up by cycling to the matches, which is occasionally a bit daft if we're playing an away match against Balerno or Lasswade. Fortunately this one was a few blocks away, or a mere 25-minute cycle around the roadworks and temporary one-way systems in central Edinburgh, which shift from day to day like the staircases in Hogwarts.

There's a bit of back-and-forth in this game: I missed an attack from black early on, but fortunately so did my opponent. He then gave me a piece and I was able to get an attack in, and just when he seemed to be possibly starting to crawl out of it, the game ended on a decisive blunder.