Thalia Holmes wins BBC Chess Masters

Not having been a devotee of Strictly Come Dancing, Bake Off, the ice-skating show or any other such thing, I wasn't expecting too much from Chess Masters but, as ever, I'm happy to be proved wrong.

The dense mixture of short time limit games, puzzles and simultaneous games against Grand Masters made for a rigorous challenge but one of the dozen of them had to win. Easily the most terrifying of those was the inevitability of being thrashed by 9yo Bodhana Sivanandan while she did the same to two others but one only had to last longer than one or other of those did.

I'd made Caitlin Reid favourite early doors, being the most impressive in the first group but soon put Thalia alongside her after she came through the second.

One can't help but notice the diversity of the chosen participants that covered male, female, ethnicity, age most diligently when, one can't help but notice, most of the best cherss players in the world are male and, now, aged 18-40. But it was by no means a championship. It was 'representative' in the same way that I represented the Civil Service without being demonstrably among its top 16 players.

They weren't all that good. I very much doubt if I'd have won it but I'd like to think I'd have been better than a few of them. What it showed, at least at such a level, is that chess games are lost by mistakes more than won by superior know-how. Even in the final, the resilient 63yo Richie had the opportunity to checkmate in, I think, three moves but he missed it, ended in deep time trouble and Thalia effectively got lucky.

It was all about 'pressure' and who didn't blow it. I didn't think Caitlin would, she looked like the cool, class act but she did. So it was a bit of an old-fashioned Grand National in which one needed to stay the distance and be lucky, a big part of which is dependent on others making crucial mistakes.

I don't know if it will go round again into another series. I'm not sure that chess can get by on such thin pretexts as the glitz, glamour and noisiness of Strictly but it was worth a go. Well played, the chess.

And I'm glad to report that I've got back to 1800 at the 2 mins+ 1 second discipline at Lichess, am safely above that at 'Classical' and those 2000+ ratings at the time limits in between are banked and not to be risked so, as far as chess goes, everything's right with the world.