"Forcing" resignation

Last week I celebrated my meteoric rise to power within the British Universities Chess Association by writing the official report for the 2013 Team Championship. Unless for some reason you want to know what actually happened, I suggest you skip it. It's objective and needlessly complimentary to other universities. This blog post is here to redress the balance.

From a personal perspective, I was having the tournament of my life on Saturday. In round 1 I offered a draw to a 203 who laughed, accepted and told me I was completely winning. Next came a "forced" resignation against Southampton 2 and in round 3 I stumbled into a mating win against Bristol 1 despite being smashed about the board. Sunday, I don't really want to discuss. Suffice it to say, that there were about 120 points between my Saturday and my Sunday performance. It's inexplicable.

But my point is, what is all this nonsense about "forcing" resignation? It's a phrase that I've recently started seeing everywhere. Although that may be because after three years I've only just started to read Silman's Complete Endgame Course. But even then, I'm sure I've seen it more and more in chess.com articles. Sure, you can force checkmate, but resignation is a personal choice and it's pretty presumptuous to decide when your opponent should be giving up.

To illustrate my point/wind up a rival, I'd like to share my game against Southampton. This was our 3rd championship, making us BUCA institutions and despite years of smack talk we'd never seriously played. Indeed, Bristol and Southampton have not yet seriously contended for a title place and have had to settle for an intense private competition. Not that our first teams are aware of it.

So did I force resignation? I'm not entirely sure. Can you ever actually  force resignation? Probably not. Was this all an excuse to show off this game? Maybe. Did it feel good to finally see-off three years' worth of banter with a crushing 20 move game? You're damn right it did.

Luke, I'm not even sorry.

If you feel so inclined, all the games and results can be found on the official BUCA website.

Lastly, in the latest installment of increasingly desperate plugs, if you're on twitter you should be following  @bucachess. Its chess wisdom and insight is guaranteed to double your chess grade!