The National Club Championship was held last weekend at Coláiste Éanna in Rathfarhnam, Dublin. Seventeen teams contested a 5-round Swiss.
The event was well covered, with live games available at Lichess and Livechesscloud, and results, etc., available at Chess-Results.com.
The event turned into a three-way struggle between Gonzaga, who were top seeds, Master C.C., who, though a Heidenfeld Trophy team this year, were second seeds, and Knights of Éanna.
After two rounds, all three of these, plus Elm Mount and Limerick, had won their first two matches.
In the third round, Gonzaga fell to a surprising 2 – 4 defeat to Knights of Éanna. In a closely contested match, the crucial turning point was in the game on board 4, where Gordon Freeman turned a winning position into a losing one with a very strange blunder, so odd that it looked like a live boards glitch. What happened?
In the fourth round, Master C.C. had a decisive 4½ – 1½ win against Knights of Éanna, sweeping the bottom three boards. Indeed, their progress had been powered all along by these boards: they would have drawn two matches and lost two if only the top three boards had counted. Was it a strategy to arrange boards this way? If so, it worked out handsomely for them. If so, they were also within their rights, as “[t]here is no restriction on how the board order is decided” in the National Club Championship rules (item 16). Though it did not affect the match result, game points also turned out to be important, and Knights of Éanna dropped a half point through an agonising blunder on board 2.
The final round saw Master C.C., on the maximum 8 match points, paired against Gonzaga, and Knights of Éanna against Cork, with the last three teams on 6 points each. Crucially, Gonzaga was well ahead on the first tie-break criterion, game points, with 17½, with Knights of Éanna on 16, Master C.C. on 15½, and Cork on 13. Thus Gonzaga were assured that if they beat Master C.C., and scored 4½ or more points in the process, they were assured of finishing at least equal first with Knights of Éanna on game points.
Gonzaga duly recorded an impressive win of exactly 4½ – 1½ aaginst Master C.C. On board 1, Sam Collins squeezed out a win in an ending Seán J. Murphy could have held, while on board 4, Gordon Freeman won an interesting game against Darun Govindaraju,; this was the only loss by Master C.C. on the bottom three boards over the entire event.
Knights of Éanna came close to tying on game points, with a 5½ – ½ win against Cork. Their only dropped half point came on board 6. Derek Smith had earlier had an overwhelming position, but made everything immensely more complicated for himself.
82… ?
He could still have won in the diagrammed position, via 82… Kd1!. The reader is invited to work out all the variations. Instead, he erred with 82… Kc3?, and after 83. Ra3+ Kb2 84. Re3, the win was gone.
[Click to replay the full game.]
This left Gonzaga, Knights of Éanna, and Master C.C. tied for first on 8 match points each. Gonzaga had scored 22 game points, and took first place ahead of Knights of Éanna on 21½, with Master C.C. well back on 17.
Even if Derek Smith had won the game above, Gonzaga would still have finished first on tie-break after applying the next tie-break criterion, Sonneborn-Berger for Team Tournaments (the sum of the products of the scores made by each opposing team and the score made against that team). Gonzaga was so far ahead on this metric under the actual results that they were probably assured of finishing first under any permutation of final round results, though I did not verify this. Incidentally, it’s worth pointing out that the NCC rules, cited above, are admirably clear and thorough on how ties are resolved (item 21), enabling teams to see exactly where they stand; this is an area that has often caused difficulties in other tournaments.
This was Gonzaga’s first National Club Championship win since the pandemic; they had recorded four in a row from 2016 to 2019. Congratulations! The winning team was
114 games from live boards have been added to the Tournament pages here.