Christmas Eve incident in a rock bar

[Geoff Chandler]

Hi Andrew,

I recall reading that, (good book that one). Alastair White tells of a time when his team were a player short for match v a Glasgow club. They took a non-playing flat mate with them and taught them the moves in the car and the first few moves of the Pirc and offer a draw. He says the draw was accepted!

My biggest calamity as team captain was taking the Edinburgh first team to Heriot Watt for an away match only to discover I made a mistake. It was a home match and we lost 6-0 by default. Oh how we laughed...

[John Upham]

I recall reading that, (good book that one). Alastair White tells of a time when his team were a player short for match v a Glasgow club. They took a non-playing flat mate with them and taught them the moves in the car and the first few moves of the Pirc and offer a draw. He says the draw was accepted!

A 1970s CentYMCA home match at Tottenham Court Road in the London League was versus Hendon but the CentYMCA captain had forgotten to organise a team.
He decided to do a whip round amongst members in the Weights Room and came up with a team all of whom used bogus name.

We lost every board bar one and our winning player was called

U.A.V. Binconned

[Gerard Killoran]

I was playing an away game for UCL at the LSE and we were a player short, also LSE were fielding a female player on bottom board who looked a little nervous. I'd already bumped into a fellow UCL student in the bar, so I went back and asked him if he could play chess and he said he knew the moves. Somehow I managed to persuade him to take part. After while I got up to look at his board and was somewhat surprised to see our new hero had take almost all of his opponents pieces except for her Queen. So I sat down feeling rather smug. When my game finished, I went back to his board only to see that all of his pieces had been taken by his opponent's Queen and she was now trying to find a way to checkmate him. Eventually she succeeded and the result cost us the match.