Now that the 2024-2025 season is over, it is time to give credit where credit is due and look back at several of the highlights over the 14 matches that I have had the pleasure of captaining this season. While I have mentioned a lot of players in this report, I didn’t want to make it too long, so I included players approximately in proportion to the number of games that they played, but know that the contributions of all 18 people who played at least 1 B Team match are greatly appreciated.
Season Summary
The B Team finished on 9/28 match points (4W 1D 9L) and 36/84 game points (27W 18D 39L), which is better than I predicted at the start of the season. This ultimately proved sufficient to achieve 6th, ahead of Clevedon in 7th on 8 match points and Yate in 8th on 5 match points. Going into the season, the plan was just to beat Clevedon and Yate twice and hope there were no upsets. While we beat both in the first half, we lost to both in the second half, and Clevedon also did significantly better than I expected overall, so well done to them.
Despite that, we just about managed to accumulate the required match points in the second half to achieve 6th. We were forced to play in The Link, which is basically a large open room in the Richmond Building, for 2 B Team matches, and I have no idea why but we seemed to be unstoppable in there. Both matches were tremendous upsets, as we beat two of the strongest teams, Grendel and Horfield, back-to-back 3.5-2.5 (2W 3D 1L) and 4.5-1.5 (4W 1D 1L) respectively. In fact, the Horfield home match is a strong contender for the biggest upset of the season. Come to think of it, in the A Team’s sole match in The Link, they rather-impressively defeated the eventual winners of Division 1, despite requiring 3 B Team subs. Maybe we should play in there more often, but I would much prefer a nice sound-proof room. Frankly, apart from my discovery shortly before the Grendel home match that we would be forced to play in The Link and the whole singing incident (more on that later), nothing went terribly wrong, so that’s good.
A very significant proportion of our players all finished university at the same time last year, so we were running rather low on players for the entire season. While we had to have 3 subs for the Bath home match, the vast majority of the matches required at most 1 sub, which isn’t too bad. Hopefully the B Team will be able to almost fully sustain itself next season, along with the other teams.
Transportation to away matches was also relatively smooth. We arrived on time to every match, although the buses did test my patience at times. Getting back from the South Bristol away match especially was a bit of a rainy adventure for half of the team.
With all of that out of the way, it’s time to move on to the B Team awards. I’ve come up with a number of categories that I think highlight the best (and funniest) moments of the season.
Fastest Win in Terms of Time
It should come as no surprise that Samson’s iconic game from the Clevedon away match was never overtaken as the fastest win in terms of time, unless of course you count the two games in the Yate away match that we unfortunately had to default. Samson had White and he won in under 20 minutes. Somehow, on only move 12, there were briefly 4 queens on the board, which is unsurprisingly itself a season record. Before long, Samson lost a bishop to a fork, but taking the bishop loses in hilarious fashion.
Samson threatened mate and soon forced the king into the centre of the board with a series of checks. He quickly won back his piece and his opponent resigned after the 5th consecutive check, a royal fork.
Fastest Win in Terms of Moves
While Samson’s game was never overtaken as the fastest win in terms of time, it was soon overtaken as the fastest win in terms of moves by Tommy’s game from the Downend home match. Tommy had Black and his opponent resigned after Tommy’s 18th move where he collected a free piece. This game only held the record for 11 days, however, as Argi’s game from the Grendel away match overtook it by 1 ply (half-move). Argi had White and his opponent resigned after Argi’s 18th move. He won a piece on move 15, after his opponent couldn’t find the tactical way to save it. That is not why Argi’s opponent resigned on move 18, however. It was instead because his opponent uncorked what could be described as a brilliant queen sacrifice with difficult-to-spot compensation, or it could be more accurately described as a clean queen hang.
Either way, Argi did some deep calculation here and concluded remarkably quickly that taking the queen was probably at least close to the best move, and so he did.
Most Popular Openings
Of the 41 White games this season, 29 (71%) began with 1. e4, 10 (24%) began with 1. d4, and the other 2 were lone 1. Nf3 and 1. b3 games courtesy of Dimitar and James respectively. It’s brilliant that our players found the best move on move 1 a full 71% of the time, but there’s still room for improvement so hopefully that percentage will be even higher next year. Now considering every game this season with either colour, 4 openings were much more common than the others: 1. e4 e5 with 10 games (12%), the Indian Game with 12 games (15%), the Caro-Kann with 13 games (16%), and, very predictably in clear first, the Sicilian with 23 games (28%).
Most Accurate Game
While accuracy isn’t necessarily the greatest measure of game quality, a high accuracy does generally indicate a high-quality game. The two most accurate games are very close in accuracy according to my engine so I would be remiss to only mention the most accurate one. As well as being the fastest win in terms of moves, Argi’s game from the Grendel away match was also the second most accurate game, at an excellent 96.8%. The most accurate game was my game from the Clevedon away match, at 96.9%. However, it should be noted that my opponent in that game forced a line where the queens and both pairs of knights get traded by move 10, so I essentially farmed accuracy in this game simply by not throwing a position that would be impressive to lose. After the aforementioned forced trading line, this game also featured perhaps the funniest-looking position of the season, where all of my remaining pawns and pieces are on their starting squares, except my king, which is on the 6th rank.
All I can say to explain this position is that this is opening preparation. Part of the appeal is that blitzing out such a funny-looking line in classical is rather amusing. In this game, for over 20 moves, I was just manoeuvring and trying to make a draw as efficiently as possible, since I figured I had no winning chances. However, when we reached a same-coloured bishop endgame, my opponent offered a trade of bishops, which loses because the imbalanced pawn structure makes the resulting king and pawn endgame winning. I then basically won by accident because I was just trying to play the best moves so that I could draw and I stumbled into a win in the process, so that’s how I farmed accuracy.
Biggest Upset
The biggest upset of the season was comfortably Jake’s win in the Horfield away match, where his opponent was around 328 points higher-rated than him. As White, Jake had a dead-lost pawn-down endgame with a rook and a bishop each but his opponent eventually allowed a bishop-winning rook sacrifice.
However, Black still had some drawing chances due to only having to eliminate 3 pawns to secure the draw. There were objectively such opportunities but, in the end, Jake preserved an f-pawn and his opponent resigned instead of awaiting the inevitable winning zugzwang. In fact, Jake scored an even bigger upset of 345 points for the A Team near the end of the season.
Most Drawish
Only 3 people drew more than 1 B Team game this season. In his 7 games as a sub, Tommy made 2 draws, so around 29% of his games were drawn. Alex drew 2 of his 5 games, so 40% of his games were drawn. As for the highest proportion of draws by a player who played at least 3 games, as I said in the previous section, I somehow drew a whopping 50% of my games (7 out of 14). My openings are generally extremely aggressive and I hardly play in a drawish manner so it’s somewhat bizarre that that ended up happening. I drew in both Grendel matches, both South Bristol matches, both Yate matches, and the Clevedon home match. The outlier there is the Clevedon home match, which is hardly surprising because that was the infamous singing match. I have never been, and probably never will be again, any less focused on a game than I was during that match. I was losing, certainly practically-speaking, but my opponent thought, for some reason, that I would easily hold the draw and thus just offered a draw, which I naturally immediately accepted. While this title is also only fairly awarded to players who played at least 3 games, one player drew more than 50% of their games, and that player is Ignacio, who played 1 game and drew it.
Most Thrilling Game
This was a tough one but I’ve settled on my game from the Grendel home match for reasons that will become clear. I am now good friends with my opponent from that game and I prepped hard for it so all the pieces were in place (no pun intended) for it to be a thrilling game. I got surprised on move 5 so I had to adapt my strategy a bit. We eventually finishing developing all of our pieces and started manoeuvring, which got us to the rich position below, where the pawn structure is imbalanced and there are lots of pieces still on the board, open lines, and different plans for us to consider.
We traded the knights tactically and agreed to a draw.
Biggest Fan of Pawn-Down Rook Endgames
As you might have guessed by how oddly specific this one is, the biggest fan of pawn-down rook endgames is abundantly clear. Thomas played 4 games for the B Team this season. In game 1, he reached a major piece endgame but his opponent blundered a rook to a fork and tragically resigned before Thomas could make it a pawn-down rook endgame. In game 2, it took Thomas 37 moves to get to a pawn-down rook endgame, but he smashed that record in game 3 by reaching a pawn-down rook endgame in only 26 moves. Finally, in game 4, it took Thomas 41 moves to construct one of his now-signature pawn-down rook endgames. This is consistency on another level. Hopefully all of Thomas’ games next year will be pawn-up rook endgames for a change.
Best Save
Firstly, honourable mentions should go to Samson’s miraculous comeback from -7 in the Yate home match and Dimitar’s save from -6 in the Clevedon home match. While those are hard to beat, Ismail’s save also in the Clevedon home match (I wonder why so many of the games in that match were unusual) was even more miraculous.
Ismail had White and the evaluation had been plummeting for several moves until this position, where it’s mate in 3. In fact, it’s effectively mate in 2 because it’s only mate in 3 if Ismail blocks with a rook that can be immediately taken without changing anything but the move number on which mate occurs. The win is Bxg2+ followed by Qc5+ or Qb6+ after Kg1, so both moves are the only sensible checks, since Re1+ clearly just hangs a rook. This mate was missed in the game, however, as Rxg2 was played instead, which, make no mistake, is still -8, but there’s at least some work to do now. Ismail was soon forced into an endgame where he was down 2 pawns and only had a rook for a bishop and a knight. Much later, in a time scramble, Ismail’s opponent blundered the bishop to a pin, which resulted in an objectively drawn endgame, but one where Ismail was still the one in danger, albeit much less danger than before.
In the end, Ismail managed to fend off his opponent’s fearsome queenside pawns and hold the draw, which, I think it’s safe to say, is the most unbelievable save of the season.
Last to Finish on Average
What I mean by this measure is the average position of players ranked in the order in which their games concluded, so basically taking the 6 players in every match and ordering them with 1 being the first person to finish their game and 6 being the last. Again it’s only fair to consider players who played at least 3 games for this because, for example, playing 1 game and finishing last could be a fluke. Since the midpoint of 1 and 6 on the real line is 3.5, that is the average. Firstly, if you’re interested, the players who finished first on average were Argi on 2.8, Samson on 2.6, and Tristan on 2. As for the players who finished last on average, 2 players were significantly ahead of the others, me on 4.5 and Alex on 4.6. However, 3 people who played 2 games finished even later than that on average, Jack and Shubham on 5 and Alex from the C Team on 5.5.
Best Quote
Ismail also definitely takes this one, but an honourable mention should go to Dimitar’s understandable reaction when, believing he had just checkmated his opponent, he stopped his opponent’s clock and declared that it was checkmate, but his opponent in fact had a legal move. Ismail’s iconic quote originated from the South Bristol home match. He had White in a rook endgame where the pawn structure was very much asymmetrical but he and his opponent had the same number of pawns. Ismail was offered a draw, but he thought he had good winning chances so he declined the draw by saying “LOL, no.”
Ismail sacrificed his b-pawn to win the d-pawn, but Black’s b-pawn proved stronger than Ismail had anticipated. This is a bit of an understatement because it soon proved so strong that Ismail resigned just before it promoted. Needless to say, “LOL, no,” aged very well.
Most Promising New Player
Every reasonable measure of promise would reach the same conclusion: Dimitar. Dimitar achieved several great results in his first season, especially while subbing for the A Team, where he comfortably drew 2 players over 2000. Speaking of the A Team, his consistent volunteering to sub for that team also made the frequently-arduous task of finding subs significantly easier, which was greatly appreciated. At the end of the season, Dimitar’s rating settled on 1827, making him one of the highest-rated players in the club in classical. Outside of the League, Dimitar also tied for 1st alongside me and James in the 3rd Stoke Gifford Rapidplay. With all of that being said, however, Dimitar’s first season in the B Team will very likely be his last because we will need him in the A Team.
Best Move
There was some fierce competition for this title this season but 4 moves stand out from the crowd, 2 from the Bath away match and 2 from the Downend away match. Firstly, we have Jake’s 40… Bg5!! from the Bath away match.
This blocks the check from the queen and now the f4 pawn is threatened because it is attacked by both the queen and bishop. The bishop cannot be taken by the pawn because it is pinned to the king by the queen. At the same moment, only a ply later in the game, and only a metre or so away, Dimitar uncorked 41. Bxb5!!.
This wins the free b5 pawn which was for some reason not defended on the previous move. Now there’s a threat of 42. Be8, which would win an exchange by pinning the rook to the king. Moving onto the Downend away match, we have Tristan’s 21… Ndb5!!.
This is a multi-purpose move; it defends the formerly-hanging knight on c3, attacks the bishop on a3, and unleashes a discovered attack on the queen, courtesy of the rook on d8. In fact, there are only a couple of moves here where White doesn’t lose on the spot, because there are no squares where the queen can defend the bishop, so it’s no wonder that the game ended on the next move. From later in the same match, we have Argi’s 21… Bd7!!.
This move simultaneously develops the bishop, defends the rook on a8, connects the rooks, pressures the a4 pawn, and does something else. Argi’s opponent was so shocked by this move, in fact, that this was the final move of the game, and, for that reason alone, I proclaim this the best move of the season.
Final Thoughts
With that, that’s a wrap on the B Team’s 2024-2025 season and my captaincy because I will be retiring in favour of becoming president of the society. It has been a great season and I would like to thank everyone who played in the B Team this season, including the subs Tommy, James, and Alex, without whom we may have been forced to default more boards than just the 2 during exam season. I would also like to thank Tommy and Ismail for helping me set up for multiple home matches. The team’s goal next year will likely be similar: staying in Division 2, but an influx of new university players could make promotion a possibility. We will see, but I wish the B Team the very best next season also.