Newcastle University: Summer KO Round 1

As we have recently expanded our club to two teams, we've had the opportunity to play against local clubs with both an A and a B team. Last month, we played our first games of the Summer KO against Gateshead and Forest Hall.

The Summer KO is a 4 board knockout tournament hosted by the Northumberland League involving teams from various local clubs in a league in a knockout format.

Here are the results of our first round, and we hope to keep you updated on all future rounds, tournaments, and league matches as well!

Newcastle A team had a domineering performance against Gateshead's A team, winning their matchup 4-0 with some beautiful tactics on display!

In Shrayan Banerjee's game, his opponent made what he believed to be a cunning attack on Shrayan's queen in the following position, but as Jacob Manley always tells us, "fortune favours the bold", and Shrayan boldly seized the opportunity to sacrifice his rook for Mr Johnson's bishop and deliver a stunning attack. He won only six moves later with an unavoidable checkmate.

This accurate play was not lost with the rest of our teammates. Both Aaron Welson and Varun Padikal were both very succinct in seizing the opportunity to crack open their opponents' centres. For Varun's game in particular, I think this could prove instructional to any of our chess club members who may feel uneasy about how to navigate a closed position. Varun's game shows how you can go from a fairly closed position to a very open one, provided you make pawn breaks with the right timing.

The B team had a difficult matchup facing Forest Hall, they fought hard losing narrowly by a score of 3–1 with two former presidents of the Newcastle Chess Society between Tom Cameron and Hanif Zaman.
Tom, representing the University, found himself on the receiving end of an uncomfortable tactical blow.

On Board 4, however, Rishabh, in his first game for the university, pulled his opponent out of prep early on and took advantage of some errors in the middlegame to snap up his opponents queen and eventually win the game in a comfortable fashion.

Despite the unlucky result the B team still have a chance to bounce back and advance further in the tournament with an upcoming game against their next opponents in July.

Both our teams have great chances to do well in the early stages of this tournament and we wish them luck in the next rounds of the Northumbria CC Summer KO!

All the games from the first round can be found here.

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