There were a number of high-quality entries for this year’s Battersea best game prize but this swashbuckling effort by one of our newer members Conor Gay, up against visiting grandmaster Stephen Gordon in a simul, deservedly scooped the silverware.
In his great book Chess for Tigers, the late Simon Webb talks about how to take on heffalumps – stronger players that you’d normally struggle to land a glove on in a standard game.
Webb argues that your best bet when encountering a heffalump is to lure them onto swampy ground – in other words a fiendishly sharp position where, hopefully, they might sink before you.
This game is a great example of this approach in action. Conor fights for the initiative from the off and keeps setting tough challenges the whole way through until, eventually, the heffalump goes down.
