A new high water mark?

Yorkshire League again today, Bradford B the opponents. A very variable team, they have a large strong club but sometimes struggle to put out good 2nd team. They almost managed today, outranking us substantially on the top 4 boards, but only had 5 players with a single default.

Today was my first white of the season, and after two insipid draws with black, and a very poor performance in the 4NCL online congress (2/7 including a half point bye, sub-1500 performance level!), I was out for blood. My opponent was however 69 points above me at 1873, and bashed out a string of book moves to start. So did I, obviously :-) Modern Benoni 4PA was just up my street for today. I suffer playing this in daily chess - it's just a bit too loose against perfect play - but OTB at 1800 level is another matter entirely.

I thought he had gone off piste at move 9, but actually we followed a popular book line up to move 12 and right up to my 16th move we were following Lefong Hua vs Pierre Gladu, a pair of 2250 players. At that point Gladu actually played a rather worse move than my opponent did today. I think we both did pretty well! Chess.com concurs, with 2650 vs 2050 rating assessment.

Charlie had a fantastic game with black to draw against a 2070 player, Liam also scored a draw but Mike slipped to a loss. Martin had a piece vs several pawns and the endgame looked like it could have gone either way, but ended up as a draw with simultaneous queening. So my win (together with the default) tipped the balance over to a hard-fought 3 1/2 - 2 1/2 win. A good end to the first half of the season, though I think we are still in the lower half of the division for the playoffs, which is disappointing after being much closer to the top last year. And I think 1873 is my strongest OTB victim - he's a genuine 1873 with a lot of games behind him, too.

This is the analysis if I delete the last move, which was merely excellent rather than best. Up to move 14 we were also following Sosonko vs Reshevsky 1977, who seem to be the strongest pair to have followed well down this b5 line. Coincidentally, I once played a simul against Sosonko, I was a pawn up for most of the game (he chickened out of the 3 pawns attack line in the St George) and was last player to finish against him though I lost in the end while blitzing out a theoretically drawn rook and pawn endgame under the gaze of many spectators. This was when I was about 15ish playing in a local chess congress.