Your Captain writes…

With your usual chess correspondent attending to other matters it fell to Captain Chamberlain to report on this week’s proceedings. The NLC Champion filed this despatch direct from the frontline:

“A magnificent performance by Mister Iounnou, way ahead of the field.  However, while most of us were attempting to play a form of 10-minute chess, he seemed to be stuck in the more traditional 5-minute version, looking at the number of games he played – twice as many as some of us!  Obviously didn’t do him any harm…Another good evening of NLC online chess.”

Games of the week

Each week, this journal’s Editorial Committee will present to the Chess Circle two online games from that week’s session that, in their esteemed view, display a particularly lively charm. Perhaps it will be a ferocious attack, or a dogged defence, maybe a catastrophic blunder or simply something that piques the Committee’s interest…

Captain Chamberlain also indicated a brace of games suitable for ‘Games of the Week’ glory.

Mister Giffin QC MA (Oxon) had a good night, and this game shows why – a ferocious stack of pins and revealed attacks left black with nowhere to go:

And it’s only fair to show the winner in his pomp – out-calculating white in a series of exchanges to eventually land a game-ending knight fork:

See you next week, where Mister Widdicombe will be back and once again enthusiastically throwing himself into unsound sacrificial attacks that lead inexorably to a quick checkmate (err…of his own king).

‘Till then…