Finally the 'submarine' strategy of the PNG team might be paying off. Having played the swiss gambit deep into the tournament (1 win in the first 9 rounds), we ended up in the 'wooden-spoon' playoff match against the Seychelles on the bottom board. It is pretty random stuff done the far end of the hall and my game as white started with
1.e4 d5 2.d4! dxe 3.Nc3 e5! 4.Nxe4 Qh4! According to my database this is indeed a novelty, and possibly not a good one. Certainly after
5.Ng3 e4? 6.Qe2 Nf6 7.Nf3 Qg4 8.h3 Qe6 9.Ng5 Qd5 10.N5xe4 I was just up a pawn (with a better position as well) but in a depressingly familiar reply of most of my other games in this tournament, I played a couple of poor moves and the game ended in a draw (my 6th so far).
The other 3 PNG players had less trouble than I did, all recording wins, and so we scored our second match win and picked up another 3.5 game points.
I suspect that our final opponents may well be US Virgin Islands, as they have no one left to play, and while on paper we should be favorites, PNG did lose to them in 2002.
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