4NCL Online League – Season 10 – Round 4 report

4NCL Online League – Season 10 – Round 4 report

With Round 4, played on Tuesday 22nd October, our 8 teams moved into the 2nd half of season 10 with the promotion and relegation battles now fully underway.

At an individual level, we scored 14 wins, 3 draws and 15 losses which we converted into 3 match wins, 2 match draws and 3 match losses – sadly, 3 of our wins were by default, as were 2 of our losses – see below for the gory details….

Gory details

Well….this was our worst ever evening in terms of “things going wrong” ☹ – with 3 different players dropping out relatively late in the day I got a bit punch-drunk making the team tweaks and didn’t notice I had doubled up Andrea and put him in two teams!

Normally this wouldn’t be a problem as the 4NCL arbiters would see the error message this generated and get me to tweak the teams. Unfortunately, they were also having a “bad day” and missed the error until too late to rectify and then shuffled up the boards generating a default in the G team, not realising we had an H team! We were now minutes from the round starting and whilst they tried to recover the situation it was all a bit flaky team-wise as the round started. The chaos was then compounded by several of our opponents defaulting boards and one of our games being played as a Correspondence match. A big apology to Graham Hillman, as one of our subs on the day, who didn’t even get to play and had to watch the carnage unfold ☹

Actual chess

Back to the actual chess that DID get played….with 4 rounds from 7 completed the promotion / relegation battles now ramp up for the final 3 rounds and the Wessex teams will feature in many of these.

Division 1

Wessex A were missing a few regulars so looked a bit different, particularly with Dominic making his return a 31 month break! East Kilbride turned out to be a lot tougher than their grades suggested and a hard-fought match ended up 2-2 with white winning all the games – our wins came from Jamie & Richard. Wessex A currently sit in 2nd place although, with just one point separating the top 5 teams it is likely to go down to the wire ref who goes into the Div 1 play-offs. We will play 2 of the bottom 3 teams so that may bode well, FLW!

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Wessex B faced strong opposition with the Shropshire & Friends 1 team, led by Keith Arkell on board 1. A long grinding rook endgame win from Roger was our only success although Peter forced Keith Arkell to demonstrate great endgame skills to eventually win a very tight endgame. Keith Arkell is the 3rd GM we have faced – in previous seasons we have run into Mark Hebden (twice!) and Danny Gormally – understandably we have yet to nab a result against one.

Just one point separates the top 5 teams in this group, an interesting parallel to the Wessex A group, although this time we are in the bottom 3 and hoping to see the other 2 sent down. As we are yet to play the other 2 in the relegation zone, two wins could see us survive in our first season back in Div 1.

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Division 2

Wessex C lost 2-1 to Shropshire & Friends 3 in the battle of the “3rd teams” with Reenen our only win, helped by an opponent’s mouse slip blunder. Bill’s game was played in Correspondence mode when his opponent made a faulty challenge which nobody spotted, so ended up as a double default.

Wessex C are currently in 3rd place and face the 1st, 2nd & 8th teams in their last 3 rounds so 3 wins will secure a play-off place – no pressure

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Division 3

Despite facing a very strong Wells Hartbreakers 1 team, Wessex D emerged with a hard fought match draw secured by a win from Hugo and draws from Arjun & Phil.

Our D team lie in 4th place and have yet to play the 2nd, 5th & 8th teams, so could get promoted if we can win some of these.

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Wessex E looked to have a close match grade-wise however won comfortably with wins from Rob & Ed and, sadly, another default win for Zoltan.

With 7 points from 8, Wessex E are in 2nd place in their group with a real chance of promotion (possibly ahead of Wessex D in the other group!) We need to play the 1st, 3rd & 5th teams to complete our season so some of these matches will be “double-pointers”

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Division 4

Our F team looked likely to have a comfortable match against Bishop Trojans and so it turned out, with wins from Rob, Doug & Andrea plus a draw from Simon to notch up a 3.5 – 0.5 win. With 7 points from 8 , still leading our section, and having played all the top half teams I am cautiously optimistic we will be looking for promotion

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Division 5

Wessex G had a strange match with a “real” default win on board 1 and a “technical” default loss on board 4 so only 2 actual games played….

In the games played, a win from Michal gave us the match as the other team had a penalty half-point deduction – given the general chaos around the pairings mentioned earlier plus the fact that we had players ready to play we did not receive any default penalty – a small consolation, as that did give us the match win.

Wessex G now sit in 11th place (of 24) and likely to finish mid-table.

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Wessex H faced a brand new (and strong) team who gave us a default win start and then still proceeded to win 3-1. I suspect they will now shoot up the league but given they missed the first 3 rounds will not make the play-offs

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So a reasonable evening overall, with wins for Wessex E, F and G, draws for Wessex A and D and losses for Wessex B, C, and H

Stats-time

With 4 rounds completed our 100% club is now down to just Andrea on 4/4, closely followed by (unbeaten) Simon & Hugo in the race for the “Golden Pawn”

4 – Andrea Bucchi

3.5 – Simon Redmill, Hugo Melling

Hugo Melling won the “biggest upset” award with his win, beating a player graded 140 points higher.

We have now had 47 different players in action across the 4 rounds – an impressive 13 of these have played in all 4 rounds.

Keith Gregory, Wessex Captain, October 22nd 2024

 

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