The second last round of the Winter Cup was today, all three grades have clear leaders that will be hard to catch.
- A reminder that the Merv Morrison tournament is on Labour weekend ( Friday 21st to Monday 24th). You can still enter if you want of follow it via vega.
- There will be no Chess on monday night the 24th of October
- The Spring Cup is starting in November, please enter on the signup sheet at the Centre or via email or txt.
Winter Cup round 6 PGN by Alex Nagorski
A Grade
Nathan Goodhue had a good game against Allen Fan but blundered a piece and resigned.
Alex Huang’s position got steadily worse againts Bruce Watson and he resigned when he was about to lose a piece. The computer does show a way to keep it although his position was still bad (so I’m not sure if he saw the tactic or not).
John Duneas played an inferior opening line agains Mike Steadman and went rapidly downhill from that.
Daniel Gong and Alphaeus Ang swapped to a draw.
B Grade
Tim Ha describes his game against Hilton Jacobs: ” We agreed last week that I will play English opening 1.c4 and he’ll play 1… e5. He continued with his plan around putting a piece on b3, by which he won Daniel Gong recently in a rapid game. I managed to resolve my positional weakness and won a pawn. But just as soon as I was going to win more pawns, I blundered a piece under a pin 
🙁 However, Hilton took it with an illegal move (bishop jumping from f6 to c4), so he suggested a draw, which I gladly took. 
🙂 The position IMHO was won for White, if I hadn’t made the last mistake. But the end was a happy and funny one.”
Alex Nagorski (playing Black) wrote these comments on his game against Done Eade: “Black fully equated the game. The Bishop sacrifice was a surprise. Intuition told me that the attack looked suspicious as all Black pieces are centralised. However, the surprise took its effect, and I failed to find the correct defence line which was 16…Kxh7 17.Ng5+ Kg8 18.
Qh5 Rfd8 and the king escapes. White gets 2 pawns for the piece, but Black is solid if not better. Analysing the game with Don, we agreed that the final mistake was 17… Bg4 whereas 17… Qxd4 had only a pawn down and allowed Black to fight much longer. ”
Richard Taylor commented on his game against Keith Ward “I beat Keith who played the Pirc which I feel is difficult to play as Black but is still good if handled well. But I knew that he always plays too quickly“. My review of the game was it had a lot of tactics and Keith missed some hard-to-see lines.
C Grade
Leader Bishop Everett beat Andrew Michael to keep his sole lead. Clinton Wells also won to be half a point behind on second by himself. Wins for Mathew Steadman, Xinyang Liu and Euan MacDougall leave them on third-equal another half point back.
The Vega Websites for the Winter Cup Are:
Links to the Schedule for A and B grade are on the 2016 Tournaments page.
If you are unable to play please contact Simon Lyall either via text (021 575 233) or email to contact @ aucklandchess.nz . Normally you will get a half point bye. Please let us know as early as possible.
The draft draw for C grade is below. Please remember that this may change if there are additional byes
