Luck of the draw
The latest season of the 4NCL on-line club league has just ended. It runs on alternate Tuesday evenings, interleaved with the 4NCL congress I wrote about, so it's entirely possible to enter both. I persuaded a few club mates from Settle to have a go this time, and it worked out very well. Teams are 4 boards, and we seem to have 4 keen players, with one occasional who wasn't so keen but was prepared to fill in when necessary.
Top 4 divisions are each a pair of parallel 8 team round robins (with a final playoff between the top pairs in the parallel divisions) but the bottom 5th division where new teams go is just a standard 7-round Swiss among the remaining teams - of which there were 33 this time. After a slow start with 2 draws and a loss we got into our stride, finishing off with 4 consecutive wins to finish 2nd in the league (equal top on points but 2nd on tie-break)! An amazing result and I have to say we were very lucky with the way the Swiss system treated us. Due to the slow start we were matched against fairly weak teams throughout, not playing a single team that finished in the top 8. All the other teams at the top end of the league had multiple tough opponents. Top 4 get promoted so we will be in the proper league system next time, and perhaps with hope of a good result there too as Divs 3 and 4 don't really look much stronger than what we already faced. There's a fair amount of churn of players and teams between seasons so the divisions aren't all that well stratified by performance.
Charlie scored an impressive 4 out of 6 plus a default win on top board (and his sole loss was an e-board error caused by sliding a rook in a winning position), I got 5 out of 6 on the significantly easier board 2. Mike and Michael were both much newer to on-line play and scored 2.5 and 3.5 respectively, the latter off only 6 games and the former suffering against a blatant cheat in one game. Liam was a bit unlucky not to score in his two fill-in games.
In fact the cheat was the only black spot in an otherwise enjoyable season. I'll write about that separately as it's quite an eye-opener.
As well as the vagaries of the Swiss system, yesterday's game was also a lucky draw for me on the board. A small miscalculation in the middle game prevented me from pressing for an advantage and the game was heading for a tame draw when I blundered very carelessly in the late endgame, which neither myself nor my opponent noticed. I repeated the blunder 3 times in all before we agreed a draw!
The three huge blunders knocked my centipawn loss score down a chunk, from a respectable 19 for the first 40 moves, to a very average 42 by the time the game ended 7 moves later! Still, onward and (literally) upward, in terms of 4NCL divisions at least.
