English Chess Forum

Jon D'Souza-Eva wrote:

Alex Holowczak wrote:He's on the live boards this afternoon:
14) Peter Poobalasingam (ENG, 2332) v Pouria Danini (IRI, 2430)

Interesting position, Peter seems to be winning material. 22.Qg2 surprised me, I was expecting exf6 or Bxh5 and was trying to decide which one I'd plump for if I was White and then Peter played something completely different!

Well, even if he swapped queens, it still looked good. E.g. 22... Qxg2 23. Kxg2 Rh6 24. e4 g5 and white looks better. He's a pawn up, and has had a game or two where he's looked better but his opponent has stumbled into something that worked. I imagine he's hesitant to create a material imbalance, and being a pawn up, is just trying to grind it out.

22. Qg2 was met with Qc8, so he can take the R now if he wants...

Edit: He didn't; he played g4 instead. Rook looks trapped, he can win a pawn on c6, and he has a better position. It's looking good.

I thought 34.a3 looked very strong. If 34. ... Na6 (the only safe square for it) then 35. d6! Bxd6 36. Bxb7

He just sacrificed his Queen for Rook and Bishop! Or at least, tried to; his opponent didn't take the Queen back. It looks rather wild and wacky to me...

OK, he got a rook and two pieces for the queen and two pawns, they're down to their increments, and the King safety is nil. Probably won't be a draw this one...

58. Rxh6 looks a nice win?

This still looks looks like a sure fired win after Nf7+

Sorry, that was rubbish, but what Peter played must do the trick

You can march to b4 and play Rb3 after the 5 checks

Or Rc3 in this line, then Black will/should resign

Officially over - well done Pete, can we get the other England results?

Matthew Turner wrote:Officially over - well done Pete, can we get the other England results?

UK technically!

Sarah and Hannah were both on 2/5. Sarah has been unlucky to yoyo between 2300s and 1800s, getting the 2300s with black, and the 1800s with white. She was due an 1800 with white this afternoon. Peter is now on 3.5/6, Vedantha was on 1.5/5. Don't know the other results until either the website is updated, the results appear on chess-results.com, or I get an e-mail from Lorin...

The UK team score is composed of 2 men, and 1 woman (due to having 57:37 ratio of males to females, which is > 1:5:1). So UK are on at least 7/18, which is brilliant. The team had gained 46 rating points between them before this afternoon, so it's been a very successful trip so far!

Other round 6 results:

Vedantha Kumar was white against Marijn Otte (Holland, FM rated 2264) and drew.

Sarah Hegarty was white against Ashanti Rajapaksha (Sri Lanka, rated 1790) and won.

Tomorrow is a rest day, and I gather Lorin is writing a mini-report so far for the ECF website.

Their play has exceeded expectations massively:
Peter: TPR 2521, +22.8 (on track for an IM norm)
Vedantha: TPR 2251, +20.3
Sarah: TPR 2097, +0.9 (yoyoing between 2300s and 1800s with the wrong colour each time)
Hannah: TPR 1972, +17.5

I'm very happy with how well it's going. Makes the amount of faff there was in getting there worth it.

Live games this morning:
11) Bayarsaikhan Gundavaa (MGL, 2460) v Peter Poobalasingam (ENG, 2332)

A reasonably balanced Grunfeld position at move 20. Unfortunately at this point a problem developed with the live games (and not for the first time).