West Bridgford Stop Grantham's Winning Streak!

 "Always look on the bright side of life..."

Nottinghamshire League, Division 1 has restarted after the Christmas break.
Grantham-1 has already won six league matches in the row. Yesterday, however, this team was defeated by currently better opponent. West Bridgford-1 stopped this winning streak when beat Grantham-1 3:2.

West Bridgford-1		3:2	Grantham-1
Richmond RJ	194	½:½	Birtwistle N	192
Walker TD	175	½:½	Mangione C	192
Hearne R	172	0:1	Cumbers P	190
Webster RJ	172	1:0	Payne N	184
Truman RG	172	1:0	David I	164

As you can see, the Grantham team had some problems on the bottom boards, despite that situation did not look so desperate until the time control.

Richard G Truman

Playing against battle-hardened player, Richard G Truman, who had Black pieces, was challenging and eventually also a small contribution to the theory of the English opening. In a sideline of the "Reversed Rossolimo" line we followed the theory until the move 12 when I came up with some novelty when played 12. Nc3, which has not been employed so far (based on the ChessBase Mega Database 2012). In the grandmaster game Fridman, D (2571)-Luther,T (2566) Essen 2002 was played 12. b3 and game finished draw in 19 moves. Much to my surprise, my engines like the text move more!
Move 20.b6! is a nice positional pawn sac which was quite disruptive. However, I failed to find out the best continuation of attack which was immediate exchange of dark-squared Bishop for Black Knight and then pin the Black Bishop, double Rooks and pressure along the a-file which would give me substantial advantage. Alas, I failed to find out this plan over the board. Nevertheless, White still kept certain edge until move 31 when he blundered and remained two pawns down! Resulting Rook ending was complicated but with two pawns down rather tricky to defend.
And here is the game in full.

GM Vassily Ivanchuk

Good game until the terrible blunder and definitely I was not very amused by the results, neither mine nor our team.
However, speaking about blunders, these things happen all the time and even on the top level. Even the "Super GM's" are not immune!!!
One example for all is Vassily Ivanchuk. And please, do not get me wrong! I am not trying to draw a parallel between the ordinary mortals like me and the geniuses of the game like Vassily Ivanchuk!
Nevertheless, ChessBase recently published on its website an article "54th Reggio Emilia: Ivanchuk has a meltdown" with two Ivanchuk's games where he terribly blundered. I think it can be interesting to present these games here.

and here is the second one.
 















Well, my opinion is that if player rated 2775 can blunder then player rated around 1900 has the same rights. Do you agree with me? If not I just want to remind you one interesting quotation:

"Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes."

Mahatma Gandhi

I am sure, that Sir Winston Churchill would not be amused!