Post date: 06-Mar-2013 21:45:03
This was a first chance to visit Banbury in their new home. It was bound to be a close match as we were only one point above them in the league. Will's game against Georgs Vikanis was the fastest to progress. Pieces were swapped off quickly, until Georgs bishop looked more likely than Will's knight to gobble up pawns. However, Will managed to set a pawn in motion that Georgs was unable to stop promoting.
Geoff's game was quite startling; I look forward to an analysis in the Chequered Board. At one time, all of his pawns (except one on a3) were in his opponent's half, with two connected past pawns on the sixth and seventh, but with all of his pieces on the back rank. He was unable to deliver mate or promote a pawn, and his exposed king became the telling factor. I didn't see much of the other games. Ray looked fine in his game against Carl Portman, but lost, and there was a similar outcome for Bill. Catalin took advantage of some unprotected central pawns and rounded up the full point.
So, 3-2 down, it all boiled down to my game against Nathan Manley. Defending the black side of an Exchange French, I eventually reached the final stage a pawn up plus 2 minor pieces for a rook. The blitz finish saw the game see-saw, but I won on time with 5 seconds left on the clock.
The final result can be seen here. It also means that we are safe from relegation following Didcot's narrow defeat by Witney on the same night. That result also means that Witney win the league.
So, it was another 3-3 draw for us, our 5th of the season so far. In contrast there was only one drawn match in the entire first division last year (ourselves against Bicester). Will also pointed out the extraordinary fact that black won every game. Bill did some calculations based on the premise of a 30% chance of a black win and shows that we should expect 6 black victories once in 1372 matches.
Using the excellent OCA web site, I trawled through the last seven years of league matches (about 1000 matches) and found 2 other occurrences -
MCS Blackbirds 2 v Wantage 3 - 19 Jan 2010
MCS/B1 v Didcot 2 - 13 Mar 2007
I also turned up two matches that had 6 wins for white. Surprisingly, three players from last night's match also played in Banbury 2 v Bicester 2!
Oxford University 3 v Cowley Workers - 24 Feb 2011
Banbury 2 v Bicester 2 - 23 Mar 2010
The frequency of these matches with six wins for one colour exceed Bill's predictions, suggesting that the chance of a black win is greater than 30%. Bill discovered an interesting graph that the draw rate significantly decreases with the playing strength. So what is the chance of a draw in the Oxfordshire leagues? Roger Thetford, the OCA webmaster, provided some data from the last three years, and with a bit of simple scripting, I showed that the chance of a white win (in the OCA), is 42%, a black win 35% and a draw only 23%.
The OCA data is quite interesting to play with. For example, it shows which team is the most likely to draw its games. The answer can be seen in
the following list: MCS/1 are the most likely with 37% of their games ending in draws, whilst a Cowley 4 game has only an 11% chance in ending in a draw.
0.110 Cowley 4 0.135 Cumnor 2 0.147 City 4 0.149 Cowley Workers 2 0.150 St Clare's 0.159 Univ 3 0.166 Univ 2 0.169 Wantage 3 0.177 Banbury 2 0.178 City 5 0.186 MCS/B2 0.204 Witney 3 0.206 Bicester 2 0.232 Didcot 2 0.242 Didcot 1 0.249 Wantage 2 0.250 Cowley 3 0.254 City 3 0.254 Univ 1 0.257 Cowley 1 0.257 Witney 2 0.263 City 1 0.264 Banbury 1 0.264 Cumnor 1 0.272 Bicester 1 0.273 Cowley 2 0.281 Wantage 1 0.300 Witney 1 0.343 City 2 0.347 Cowley Workers 1 0.371 MCS/B1