The now traditional pre-season Swizzle took place on Tuesday, featuring 14 members, 3 new members and 2 quests. As usual it was a 5 round time handicap Swiss. Players got time depending on their and their opponent’s colour group (1900+ = Blue, 1700-1899 = Red, 1500-1699 = Green, <1500 = Black), with the biggest difference being when Blue played Black; 4 minutes v 16 minutes.
The 1st round draw was seeded and produced two shock results. Brian beat Mike N-E while Jan, with 2 seconds left on his clock, could only stalemate Nikolai H in a K+Q v K ending. Mike N-E continued in generous form in round 2 with a loss to Tom Pownall.
Round 3 began with 4 players on maximum points: Mike B, Florian, Graeme & Felipe, with Jan just half a point behind. Mike B beat Felipe, Florian beat Graeme and Jan maintained his challenge by punishing Drag’s poor endgame play. Mike N-E finally decided not to be so generous anymore and beat Marshall.
In round 4 Florian pinned Mike B’s queen (on d6) and rook (f8) with his bishop (c5). Mike dropped his queen back to d8, hitting Florian’s queen on g5, but Florian didn’t notice, took Mike’s rook and lost his queen. This allowed Jan to move into 2nd place after beating Graeme.
In the final round Mike B eased past Jan to win the Swizzle with a perfect 5 points out of 5. Florian recovered from his shock in round 4 to beat his old friend Nikolai Jarre and finish 2nd on 4 points. Jan finished joint 3rd on 3.5 points with Nikolai H who in round 4 had produced a nice checkmate against Drag.
The Final Scores were:
5.0 Michael Barnes
4.0 Florian Biermann
3.5 Nikolai Harrison, Jan Klingelhoefer
3.0 Nikolai Jarre, Felipe Lessa, Mark Radford, Andy While
2.5 Graeme Jennings, Mike Naylor-Eade
2.0 Mark Darlington, Jack Feltham, Brian Hayward, Marian Talmacel
1.5 Tom Pownall
1.0 Derek Padvis (from 2 games in rounds 4 & 5), Dragoljub Sudar
0.5 Marshall Redmond
0.0 Keith Roper (from 3 games in rounds 1 – 3)