On Sunday, the Wilson’s Chess A Team made its way to Harrow School for the first ECF Schools Blitz tournament. In a field of around fifteen schools with Wilson’s as the favourite, we knew our biggest rivals would be St Paul’s. The format was twelve rounds of three minutes plus two seconds increment: a very fast time control that led to some incredibly stressful time scrambles for every Wilson’s player! We were missing a few key players, but we had some strong reserves, and we fancied our chances.
The team got off to a great start, with our top four players only dropping half a point in the first six rounds. Unfortunately, our captain Rahul encountered some serious train delays on his way to Harrow and missed the first four rounds of the tournament, meaning we missed out on four points that we knew could cost dearly us by the end of the day.
The second half of the tournament proved to be much more challenging—as this was an individual tournament rather than a team vs team one, it was possible for the Wilson’s players to face each other, and this is what ended up happening! The top four Wilson’s players—Shivam, Denis, Akshay and Raghav—all faced each other in the following four rounds, with Akshay managing to beat the other three in three consecutive rounds by holding his nerve!
As we reached the final rounds of the tournament, the games were much tougher—facing stronger opponents led to more tactically sharp positions. Our heads moved left and right as we tried to find the best moves but we also needed to keep an eye on our time. In several games we were frantically moving with just one second on the clock!
In this stage, Wilson’s did reasonably well, however one player overcame the challenges presented. Shivam played consistently well and won almost all his games by finding tactical motifs, even in time pressured positions, in tough middle games arising from complex openings such as the English. This commendable performance deservedly earned him first place in the whole tournament with a total score of 10.5/12!
In the end, the team finished as runners up to St Paul’s by just two points in a very close contest. We all thoroughly enjoyed the tournament as it allowed us to take a break from the intense focus required in our usual, longer standard play league games.
Full tournament details can be found here.
We look forward to playing and—hopefully—winning the event next year.
By Shivam and Raghav, Year Eleven