The NLC summer blitz chess championship has two Golden Rules. They are not hard to understand. Nor are they hard to follow.
The rules are:
- The NLC blitz chess championship is for blundering rank amateurs.
- Each player must blunder their queen at least once during the course of the tournament.
The blitz championship has been running for six years now. There have been some twenty or so players competing over that period for the fabled Kennedy Cup. None has ever come close to breaking either of the Golden Rules.
Then along came Mister Khan. And he broke all the rules.
Earlier that evening, the unsuspecting Lib chessers bowled down to the Clubhouse on Wednesday 24 July in good spirits. Each was looking forward to playing some clownish queen sacrifices on the way to losing the majority of their games. They did not know what was about to hit them.
Not only did Mister Khan have the temerity to display some actual chess skills – a rarity not seen since the now long-forgotten days of Doctor Kirby – but he also…and this is far worse…actually calculated and then played a sound queen sacrifice to win a game.
Here is the results table for the evening:
You will see that Golden Rule no.1 is clearly broken, with Mister Khan daring to win every single game he played. No sign of the requisite blundering rank amateurism there.
And in the course of breaking Golden Rule no.1 he broke Golden Rule no.2, with the queen sacrifice, thus:
The Editorial Committee cannot endorse such antics and we know our readership will be aghast. Skill and ability at chess play has no place in 1 Whitehall Place, as a review of any of the match reports provided in this journal will evidence.
We can only hope that Mister Khan looks deeply into his own soul and reflects hard.
I would like to profoundly apologise for this uncharacteristically brilliant performance, though it certainly was not my intention. The dear editor may be aware that I did, in fact, unsoundly sacrifice my queen in the first match against Dr Saldanha (in the context of the position at least – ignoring the severe time pressure he was facing, which of course is not relevant).
Jeez – and I’m not doing shots with you again Mister Khan :/