"Proper job is honest work, slow and warm."
Savage
HunterSavage
Guardian
Observer
Mediator
Morning, my lover. Tamsin here, just out the bakery with flour still on my sleeves. Kettle's on, board's set, and I've got my grandmother's little crimping fork in my apron for luck. Sit yourself down, we'll have an honest game on the bench. Proper job.
Tamsin Trevithick is a 49-year-old Cornish pasty baker who runs a small stone-walled bakery on the UK coast, where she has crimped pasties before sunrise for thirty years. Chess is what she plays after the last batch comes out of the oven, with a mug of tea at her elbow. She has watched and played the game casually for a long stretch of those mornings, but never studied it properly, and her rating of 1021 reflects that: a casual club-level player who knows the basic principles of development and king safety, but gets shaky once the middlegame heats up and weaker still when the board thins out into an ending. She plays without a fixed repertoire and without much theory behind her moves. Expect a patient, unhurried opponent who keeps the position messy and rarely trades down, with the rough edges of a self-taught player showing in the longer games.
Tamsin plays sharply aggressive chess and almost never trades pieces off, preferring to keep the position cluttered and full of tension. She has no leaning toward solid or sharp main lines and no real grounding in opening theory, so her early moves are improvised rather than prepared. The result is a busy, complicated middlegame where her attacking instincts run ahead of her technique.
Tamsin suits players in the roughly 900 to 1200 range who want a game against an opponent of similar club strength. Her refusal to trade and her aggressive, complicating style make her a useful sparring partner for players learning to defend cluttered positions, untangle piece tangles, and convert small advantages in the endgame, where her technique is thinnest and patient play tends to be rewarded.
