With Round 7, played on Tuesday 14th April the 13th 4NCL Online league season completed.
At an individual level, we recorded 13 wins, 8 draws and 15 losses, translating into 3 match wins (albeit one was by default), 1 draw and 5 losses.
Gremlin-wise, we had a Wessex H “4-0 walkover” and 1 “no-show” default win plus one “near-miss-default” where I had to make a panicky phone call….
Whilst our Wessex A & Wessex C teams move into the play-offs next week, our Wessex D, E & F teams were all relegated. These relegations were particularly cruel as they were all nail-biters where we had to wait for the last game to finish to know our fate – see below for the gory details….
Of course, every season there are new teams appearing and old teams dropping out so some of the relegations might not happen (we hope!) when we resume in September for season 14 😊
Division 1
Wessex A, faced a useful Beckenham team and after a default win for Mark always looked likely to triumph. A further win from Gavin (in a smoothly handled good knight v bad bishop endgame) and a draw from Peter secured the victory.
Wessex A finished equal first in their group on match points with Hertford 1, who faltered after winning their first 5 rounds to lose their last 2 matches. They still edged us for the top spot by just half a point. We now go into the Div 1 play-offs for the 6th consecutive season where, remarkably, there will be no Dundee City teams, who have often provided 2 of the 4 Div 1 play-off teams in the past.
Wessex B faced the bottom team in their section, Ashfield Anonymous B, needing a match win and, ideally, our fellow relegation battlers Guildford to lose. Happily this happened and we stayed up!
Wins from Adam (like Gavin, with a good knight v bad bishop theme), Hugo & Raj plus a draw from Anuhas saw us win comfortably while Guildford 1 were swept aside by a very strong Better Call Tal team.
We finished in 6th place, well adrift of Wells Globetrotters in 5th place, but staying up 😊
Division 2
Wessex C had already secured first place ahead of their final round – this proved invaluable as we then lost to one of our main rivals, War & Piece Overlord who will join us in the Div 2 play-offs. Draws from Roger, Michal & Bill saw us lose a tight match.
The play-offs now await us for the Division 2 title 😊
Wessex D faced a similarly graded Cozy Tomatoes and lost narrowly despite a win from Tom and a draw from Jamie.
Sadly, with Atticus winning 4-0 to overtake us we now find ourselves relegated by the narrowest of margins from what has turned out to be the stronger group in Division 2 – indeed, the 3 highest graded teams in Div 2 were all in this group !
Division 3
Wessex E started the evening in 5th place and only a series of unfavourable results could see us go down – sadly, this happened as we lost to the top team in the group, Dundee City D despite draws from Yevhen and Andrea.
Hebden Bridge 3 then notched up their first 4-0 win of the season against the bottom team (in fact the only 4-0 this season in the whole group) to edge above Wessex E by just a half-point and send us down ☹
Wessex F were swept away 4-0 by the higher graded Oxford & Witney 2 team.
With our relegation rivals Dundee City E winning 4-0 we found ourselves on equal match points but still with better game points.
Sadly, we had a single default game loss earlier in the season and “number of game defaults” is the first tie-break when match-points are equal so we went down ☹
Wessex G lost to a strong London Deaf A team, despite an excellent win from Ollie against a higher graded opponent. Unfortunately that allowed London Deaf A to nudge us into 3rd place and out of the play-offs.
This has been a topsy turvy group with Wessex E going down and Wessex G nearly going up.
Division 4
Wessex H had (another) walkover – there have been far too many of these this season so I am hoping the 4NCL team can improve this next season.
With 8 points from 14 we managed to finish 7th from 32.
Wessex J had a “white wins every board” match and drew 2-2 – our wins coming from Jon & Abideen against much higher graded opponents.
With 6 points from 14 we finished 18th from 32.
Overall Summary
A tough finalround for Wessex:
- Wins: Wessex A, B , H
- Draw: Wessex J
- Losses: Wessex C, D, E, F, G (with D, E, F all relegated)
Stats Corner
Golden Pawn Contest
This ended up with Tom as a clear winner with 5 wins and 1 draw from just 6 games.
- 5.5 – Tom Anderson
- 4.5 – Peter Anderson
- 4.0 – Raj Pentakota, Nathaniel Pua, Jamie Chilton & Steven Charles
Best Wessex Result
Abideep Syed, on his debut for Wessex J, beat a player graded 605 points higher, narrowly edging out Jon Goodier (also in Wessex J) who beat a player graded 536 points higher – well done both.
Wessex War Horse Contest
Six players played in every round (down from 9 last season)
- Hugo Melling, Sonam Bhatt, Steven Charles, Andrea Bucchi, Bill Adaway, Manuel Herrera
n.b. 69 different players turned out for Wessex this season ! (up from 53 last season)
Keith Gregory
4NCL Wessex Captain
16th April 2026
