Me against Cock

The draughts season is coming to an end. Yesterday I played against Cock for the Fourth time. It was really difficult to make a good pairing of players since, unfortunately, fewer and fewer players come to are weekly evenings. Four games against the same player isn’t preferred, but it couldn’t be helped. This gave Cock the opportunity to catch up on my leading position. If he would win we would almost be tied in first place.

In the Van Westerloo opening he made a mistake which gave me the better position. I managed to build on this small advantage until I got into a winning position. At about the 40th move I was considering a plan which might have won the game. I checked if the plan was correct, and I suddenly saw that that move would lose via a combination. This meant I had to start all over, and time was not on my side. After searching and searching I finally found the plan, and a couple of moves later I had a king. Now, with about 18 seconds for 8 moves (my opponent had even less), I jut had to win this winning position.

And I did NOT. An awful mistake didn’t just lose me 1 point, nooo, I even managed to lose the entire game! .

So after one of the best games of the season, in which I successfully encircled my opponent, I didn’t reap the benefits.

After entering everything into the computer it turns out that I’m still in the lead by 0.01 points. With two more games to go the battle for the championship is now a bit more exciting than I had planned

Here I played the awful 12-17, which lost after 29-23.

An easy win gives 5-28, but 25-30 or 5-41 win easily too.

(P.S. Cock is a normal first name where I come from)