There's hardly a chess player around who doesn't from time to time take a stroll through the well thumbed pages of his or her games book. Whether the cover is cardboard or leather, the writing neat or indecipherable, it doesn't really matter. These are your creations. This is art. Maybe not Picasso but, nonetheless, your very own drawing of a pair of socks and a banana.

 

Of course we all have the contests we also like to hurry past, the stupid mistakes that we will never repeat again, at least until next time. But as well as this, sometimes there are games that are ...games. Wins to savour, losses with lessons, a tactic or combination that is beautiful - at least to your own eyes.

 

We've asked members of Penrith Chess Club to excavate a couple of favourite games from there own chess practice: games that they, for whatever reason, would like to share just for the sake of the cameraderie of chess and a very small bribe in a brown envelope. 

For our first trip in the time machine we turn to Andy McAtear and one game in the Petrov that doesn't bear any resemblance to tapioca pudding.

 

 

For Andy's second game we are once again in double king pawn territory. Here an open file, an athletic pawn and a nice dink at the end combine against his opponent.

 

An offering of my own. If Andy likes to promote a kind of interesting chaos across vast areas of the average chess board my own prefered method of play is to bore an opponent into submission, inducing a kind of mind numbing tedium that only irresponsible sacrifices or dodgy pawn breaks will cure. Normally it doesn't work but once in a while you get a game where barely a move is in the least bit exciting at all.