The A team were at full strength for the visit of Clevedon, a dangerous team, always more than capable of providing stiff opposition.

In fact, the top two boards, where we had the greatest rating advantage, did not start off particularly well for us. Steve gambited a pawn against Matthew for no perceivable gain and then found himself in a complicated skirmish in which a second one was lost. He reached an endgame where, two pawns down, he would need all his experience and, preferably a bit of luck, to salvage anything.

Meanwhile Oscar, playing Black against Max, equalized easily enough but then went in for a King-side invasion which was repudiated, leaving his own King-side more vulnerable. It morphed into an ending where Max had an impregnable central knight, an open file for his doubled rooks and no weaknesses. He spotted an exchange sacrifice which led to perpetual check and, rather than try to grind out a win, he not unreasonably settled for a half point against the highest rated player on parade.

By now the bottom four boards were fairly evenly balanced, although we had some pressure with White on boards four and six. Aron retained the advantage of moving first and gradually built huge pressure on David's centralized knight. When the time was right he executed a multiple swap of pieces culminating with his rook winning a pawn on the seventh. Aron does not mess up such positions and soon notched up our first point.

Nigel had arguably the least exciting game of the evening. He equalized comfortably enough against Paul and soon they arrived at a Queen and bishop ending where neither side could hope to make any progress.

So now we were 2-1 up with Steve still struggling to hold on. Over to Martin on board six. Much jockeying for position with all eight bishops and knights in the middle of the board took them both some time to fathom out the best continuation. And then suddenly it transpired that one of Andrew's bishops had no safe squares after it was hit by an unlikely g4 advance in front of Martin's King. Martin soon dominated the board and forced resignation ten moves later.

The good news for Steve, meanwhile, was that many of his moves to avoid defeat were relatively straightforward, while Matthew needed more time to figure out the best plan. Once the rooks came off, Matthew had four King-side pawns and two bishops against three pawns, bishop and knight and, while the engine says it was plus two, it was certainly not so obvious over the board. Suffice it to say that Steve kept making it hard for Matthew to make progress and they finally shook hands after 49 extremely hard fought moves. While it wasn't the outcome that Matthew was hoping for, he must be congratulated for giving Steve a very hard day's night!

So what was Pete up to while all this was going on? After twenty moves it was pretty level and, while Andrew had doubled his rooks on the open d file, Pete had no obvious weakness. But then he mislaid a pawn and had to resort to muddying the waters or, to quote him, using his "Chess for Tigers" training. It worked rather well because, a few moves later he was able to fork two widely separated rooks with his Queen and that, as they say, was curtains.

After some very hard fought games, we had scrambled to be equal on points with Clifton, Horfield and University. The only question was, could the B team prevent University from taking the sole lead the following day?