This Week's Matches

Ashby 3 travelled to Melton Mowbray 2 on Wednesday and consigned the Pork Pies to their ninth loss of the season. There was a very early win for Steve on board 3, followed by Josh on board 1, to put us 2-0 ahead. Larry took his customary draw on board 2 to ensure that we won the match, before Nick conjured up a loss from a draw position on board 4, to make the final score 2.5 - 1.5. We have now moved into the top half of the table and, with a match in hand of Braunstone, who are our next opponents and just a point ahead of us, we have visions of 3rd place.

On Thursday evening  a decimated Ashby 2 went to Syston, with two Ashby 5 players on boards 4 and 5, and were hammered 4.5 - 0.5 by a strong Syston 2 team, who massively outrated us on all boards. It was left to Chris to get a draw on board 3 to enable us to avoid a whitewash.

Ashby 4 were at home against Latimer and drew 2-2 in a match we should have won. The evening started badly when Nick Wyld forgot he was playing and failed to materialise on board 1. GM Mick Brown moved up the board order and was unlucky not to get a draw from his game. The talking point of the night though was IM Ian Maskery's game on board 2, where he blundered a Knight in the middle game but stumbled into an endgame where he had 4 pawns against a Knight and two Pawns. Two of Ian's Pawns were connected on the 5th and 6th rank and there was no way that his opponent was able to stop one of them from Queening. However, with just a minute on his clock he failed to see the finish and accepted a draw. Boards 3 and 4 resulted in a win for Ric and a draw for Ben.

Elsewhere, Steve beat Dan Vernon in the 1st round of the Club Championship.