Surprise, a prize

My long unbeaten run in correspondence chess is over, stretching to nineteen games before I was finally, earlier this month, obliged to resign one. A shame: I'll never achieve a sequence like that again. Still, there is some consolation in the knowledge that one of those nineteen has won the Surrey County Chess Association's 2008 prize for the Best Game In County Correspondence Matches. You've probably already read about it on Chessbase or in the papers.

Normally I never win anything: even if I'm in the running, there's always a last round in which I throw it all away. One of the virtues of correspondence play - and indeed, of Best Game Prizes - is that there's no last round for me to face.

The game, in which I beat Lorin D'Costa, is here. (I am of course not Rafa Tymrakiewicz, you need to scroll down in the menu box until you reach the appropriate entry.) You can also find it here. So good, he blogged it twice.

Oh, a diagram? Well, I can't really show you the position before a decisive coup, because there weren't any: I don't win that sort of game. But I'll give you the position before Black's 12...Be7. Quite likely he should have preferred 12...Nc6 instead, but either way, it wasn't until I started constructing the diagram that I really noticed what had been going on: I chose to use the set pieces up in start position function, because, looking at Black's first rank, they're practically all still there.