A Near Miss
by Graham Brown

Gloucestershire met Norfolk at the neutral venue of Bedford, on Sunday 16th June in the semi-finals and it was a chance for me to catch up with two good friends from Norwich, Ken McEwan and Jonathan Wells. I used to play in the Norfolk Schools Chess League. These guys were a couple of years younger than me but still hovering around the 200 BCF mark at the time to my 130. John Emms was another of this generation of strong Juniors and he went on to become Norfolk's first Grandmaster.

According to the team sheet of Gloucestershire v Norfolk, McEwan and Wells were a couple of 176 players but I knew that this was more to do with demands of careers and the like which stopped either of them being well over 200. 

All the way to the venue in a gruelling 3 hour drive in searing heat, I was wondering who would be playing, what board they would be on ... would I have to meet Ken or Jon?! 

When I arrived, they were both there - it was great to see them but this was tinged with some trepidation. It was looking like they were on 6 and 7. I was due to play board 6 due to several of our top players not being able to play. Oh dear!

Soon I discovered the Ken was on board 6 and Jon on board 7 but as luck would have it, yet another Gloucestershire top board was unavailable and I was playing board 5, Phew! I happily sat down to play a 177, forgetting that of course he outgraded me himself by 15 points. I later found out that he had been up near 200 in his time also! 

Below you will find two games. One is from Ken from the Lloyds Bank 93 tournament. He was playing Michael Adams and Ken played a brilliiant game. Myself and a friend watched the whole game and the way it panned out was that Ken got a definate advantage out of the opening and at one stage had a winning position. Then Adams started to get some room for his Queen with e4 and whipped up some amazingly powerful play to win a piece. Ken managed to limp a pawn home to reach a Queen and pawn endgame a pawn down and put up heroic resistance for hour upon hour to draw the game in a virtually deserted venue!

The other game is the game I had on board 5 in which I played my usual 1.h3. If you fancy playing this opening, you will find an article about it including a couple of my games annotated by GM Mikhail Golubev in Chess Today CT-786. (More infomation about Chess Today can we found at www.chesstoday.net) See also G Brown - R Cannell - The Clemenz in action again! on this site.

I was lucky to draw my game on board 5 after grabbing a pawn. My opponent outplayed me after that but I scraped a draw somehow. Afterwards we agreed that his 15 ... Bxe4 was perhaps a mistake. Why not keep the pin on? 15 ...Qd4 was suggested. When I looked at it later on the computer this was confirmed but Fritz also had another suggestion that was better than 15 ... Bxe4. I'm not sure if I would have recovered from the shock of it! See if you can guess the move. Click on the green link in the game score below to find out what it was. I think you will  be surprised! 

By the way, Ken and Jon both won their games.

TO PLAY THE GAMES: Please scroll down this page and click the moves to replay the games. Please note that you can also use the forward and back arrows on your keyboard to play the moves. You can also play through the variations by click them with the mouse. 

Note that the pgn file is also available by clicking the link at the bottom of this page.