Voerendaal neemt voorsprong

Karel van Delft

Vanwege het samenvallen van de Bundesliga met de Meesterklasse zijn Voerendaal en Homburg Apeldoorn overeengekomen drie partijen van de achtste ronde vooruit te spelen. Om logistieke redenen is de wedstrijd in het clubgebouw van Mülheim-Nord in Mülheim an der Ruhr gespeeld. Deze club speelt in de eerste Bundesliga.

De Duitsers zorgden voor gastvrijheid, Voerendaal-teamleider Tom Bus zorgde met Homburg Apeldoorn-speler Sebastian Siebrecht voor de organisatie, Karel van Delft was chauffeur van Roeland Pruijssers tevens fotograaf/teamleider en Ilja Zaragatski schreef onderstaand verslag. De stemming was uitstekend. De overige zeven spelers van Homburg Apeldoorn beginnen met een bordpunt achterstand, maar de strijd is nog volledig open.

Tussenstand:

  SV Voerendaal         - Homburg Apeldoorn      2-1
1.GM Mihael Saltaev (z) – IM Roeland Pruijssers  1-0
2.GM Felix Levin (w)    – IM Ilja Zaragatski     remise
3.GM Daniel Hausrath (z)– GM Sebastian Siebrecht remise

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Ilja Zaragatski reports:

In this season the eighth round of the Dutch Team Competition took place in Germany; at least for six players of Homburg Apeldoorn and Voerendaal! Since the regular playing date of April 9th clashes with German Bundesliga, the clubs in tie for the shared second place agreed to hold three games in advance in Mülheim an der Ruhr, which appeared to be the most suitable location for the predominantly German players.

Doing so, the pairings Siebrecht-Hausrath, Levin-Zaragatski and Pruijssers-Saltaev made the issue a pretty even one on paper. Nevertheless Sebi, Roeland and I were up for a positive score in order to push the remaining seven players in April a little closer to the victory. Sebastian drained from a very good score against IM Daniel Hausrath and hoped to extend it with White even further. Roeland also relied on his first move advantage in order to crack GM Saltaev's stubborn Caro-Kann Defence. Finally your reporter was able to win against GM Levin a couple of months ago in the Belgian league and wanted to see how his opponent would try to turn the table with White.

However, of course our opponents from Voerendaal would not go down without a fight. In fact, after something like two hours of playing the situation was pretty balanced. GM Levin offered a draw in the middlegame and after some thinking I figured that a draw with black against a Grandmaster in a very slightly worse position was a good deal. While doing so, I could see Roeland getting under more and more positional pressure and Sebi going for a stable advantage. Finally, Roeland could not hold his fortress and had to resign, while Sebastian's prospects for a full point were getting all the better. In the end, however, he gave his opponent just a little too much counterplay, and eventually had to give in to the draw. Thus unfortunately the prospects for the rest of the team on April 9th turned out to be not the very best, but they can still do it. And we like to believe that they certainly will!