Ellam Trophy (Surrey Division 3) - Monday 10th February 2025
6 boards, The Fellowship, Epsom.
Epsom 2 - 4½ Dorking 1 - 1½
Photo credit: Dariusz Dworakowski
The first half of the 2024/25 season has been a mixed bag for Epsom, who have struggled to fire on all cylinders. Defeats to Coulsdon and Wimbledon had left us in a rather lowly position in the Ellam Trophy (Division 3) and we knew that we would need to be nothing less than perfect for the rest of the campaign to have any chance of hauling ourselves back into the title mix.
When the pairings hit the team sheet shortly before 7.30pm, it was clear that Dorking meant business. A top three of Peter Lalić, Steve Hooker and Anthony Collins would be more than a match for any team in the division, so we knew we had to maximise our rating advantage on the lower boards and try to hold our own up top.
There was a comic incident before the match had even begun, due to a discrepancy over the outcome of the coin toss. Epsom captain Marcus Gosling flicked a shiny 10p piece fifteen feet into the air, with non-playing Dorking captain Peter Lawrence calling heads (although perhaps ‘fore’ would have been more appropriate) as it descended from on high. The coin landed on tails, so Epsom would therefore take white on the odd-numbered boards. However, Peter must have misunderstood this concept, claiming that Dorking had won the toss. It took a couple of minutes to resolve the confusion, but luckily there were no fisticuffs and the match was belatedly underway.
Epsom’s young Belarussian ‘Beast from the East’ Lev Razhnou essayed a slightly unusual response to Anthony Collins’s preferred King’s Indian-style setup, placing his bishop on f4 and aiming to delay the thematic …e5 pawn break. Anthony, a player who relishes gambits and double-edged positions, opted to shove his h-pawn in the direction of Lev’s king, trying to hook onto white’s doubled g-pawns. The attack appeared menacing, with several black pieces buzzing around the white king position, but Lev defended admirably. Despite finding himself under the cosh for most of the game, Lev was able to arrest his opponent’s attack by tactical means, utilising a timely pin to force exchanges and reach an opposite-coloured bishop endgame. Most Eastern-Europeans are strong endgame players and Lev (as well as his older sister, Aryna) is no exception. Despite continued pressure from the black king, Lev was able to secure a creditable draw against his higher-rated adversary.
On an adjacent board, Alan Bates, who has infused the Epsom squad this season with tremendous enthusiasm after a decade-long break from chess, faced Michael Duncan. White responded to Alan’s Pirc Defence with the Bryne Variation (1. e4 d6 2. d4 Nf6 3. Nc3 g6 4. Bg5) and with opposite-side castling, the game fast turned into a race of who would crack open their opponent’s king position first. White appeared to be winning that race, but failed to make the most of a promising attack and Alan was able to trade queens and breathe a sigh of relief. White’s advantage quickly diminished as his early onslaught ran out of steam, whilst Alan was able to consolidate his position, regain a pawn and activate his remaining pieces. Like two punch-drunk pugilists pooling with perspiration, the players soon agreed to a draw, barely able to raise a glove, or a knight, in anger.
There was a significant rating offset on top board, with Epsom’s dependable doctor Chris Wright (a GP by profession) very much the underdog against the chess alchemist CM Peter Lalić. Peter is by far the strongest player in the division, over 250 ECF rating points above Chris, and lives and breathes chess, boasting his own unique approach to the game. A hugely creative player, he often incorporates his own concepts such as ‘time-building’, ‘rushdown chess’ and deliberate early queen trades into his repertoire and recently has been achieving plenty of success with more attritional, positional chess based on accruing small advantages in blocked positions. Moreover, Peter plays for several Surrey League clubs thanks to the ‘multi-club rule’, including for Epsom in the Stoneleigh Trophy, and won our most recent Epsom Blitz tournament. Chris, essaying his preferring English Opening as white, played calmly despite an aggressive early …h5 and …f5 pawn pushes towards his king and remained vigilant against any attempts by his opponent to muddy the waters. With black low on time in a level endgame, Chris made a timely draw offer, which Peter accepted after some consideration. An excellent outcome for Epsom on a board that Dorking would have been hoping to win. Three games, three draws.
While Chris’s game was an oasis of calm, things were really kicking off on the lower boards. With the white pieces, Chris Rigby was keen to put a difficult patch of form behind him, confidently taking on Andy Chesworth’s Sicilian Scheveningen (1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 d6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 Nf6 5. Nc3 a6 6. Be2 e6). Chris played accurately and positively for the first 20 or so moves, as you often need to do in any theory-heavy Open Sicilian, and established a reasonable middlegame with strong queenside pressure. A couple of errors by his opponent gave Chris a chance to liquidate to a winning endgame.
Probably the quickest way to win. When ahead on material, try to trade pieces and reduce any counterplay to zero. Chris then successfully created a passed a-pawn, for which his opponent was obliged to sacrifice his remaining knight before throwing in the towel a few moves later. An excellent performance by Chris, as he moves into double figures of standardplay wins for Epsom.
The Surrey League’s one and only North Macedonian Oliver Kuzmanoski always lights up a room with his beaming smile, but his performance on the chessboard was equally bright, dispatching his underrated Dorking opponent, Kevin O’Shaughnessy with aplomb in perhaps the most striking performance of the evening. With the black pieces, Oliver responded classically to his opponent’s Ruy Lopez with the favourite reply of many a world champion, the Morphy Defence (1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6). He then showed good tactical awareness to exploit a slip-up by his opponent on move 17.
Oliver soon won another pawn and adopted a typical strategy of trading pieces whenever possible. The computer approves of Oliver’s attempts to liquidate to a winning endgame and once the queens came off, black’s kingside pressure began to pay dividends. Exploiting a pin against the enemy knight, Oliver bagged a piece and his opponent resigned on the spot. This gave Epsom a winning advantage in the match.
The final game to finish was the Board 2 tussle between Epsom captain ‘El Presidente’ Marcus Gosling, with the black pieces versus Dorking’s Steve Hooker. These two similarly-rated players last faced off back in the 2017/18 season, before the creation of Epsom Chess Club, when Marcus was playing for Surbiton soon after returning to the UK from Russia. Marcus was defeated that day, but on this occasion claimed the spoils in a topsy-turvy and error-strewn encounter. White plumped for the Advance Variation in response to Marcus’s Caro-Kann, attempting an interesting gambit line to which black responded incorrectly (1. e4 c6 2. d4 d5 3. e5 Bf5 4. h4 h5 5. Bd3 Bxd3 6. Qxd3 Qa5+ 7. b4!? Qb5?!). It is possible to accept the gambited b-pawn or simply retreat the queen thematically with 7…Qa6, offering a trade. Alas, Marcus went for a riskier reply and was fortunate that his opponent missed a critical line that would have procured a significant plus. After some terpsichorean knight manoeuvres by Marcus to harass the centralised white king in a chaotic middlegame, the game boiled down to the following position:
A rather fortuitous conclusion, but Marcus’s win put the icing on the cake of a resounding 4½-1½ victory for Epsom 2 – much-needed if we are to keep pace with our Ellam Trophy rivals.
Puzzle Answers
1) 39. Rc8!
2) 17. Nxd5! Nicely exploiting the pin on the b1-h7 diagonal.
3) 49. b3! wins, as white cannot stop the b-pawn from queening.