With hardly an anxious moment, the varsity hockey team chopped down a skimpy Brown sextet 5 to 1 last night at Watson Rink and moved into a tie for second place in the Ivy League.

First place in the league appears to be just a matter of time for the Crimson. The team scored in every period and kept constant pressure on the Bruin squad, which had come to Cambridge on the wings of recent consecutive victories over Yale and Princeton.

Brown, playing with a skeleton lineup of a goalie, four defensemen and two lines, skated hard and jumped fast, but was no match for the slick varsity team.

The Crimson took just a few minutes to warm up and scored first at 6:42, when Dave Grannis's line, celebrating Ike Ikauniks' 19th birthday, peppered Bruin goalie John Dunham with several shots before Grannis finally poked it in. Dunham finished the match with a total of 39 saves.

This line, which had one of its most effective nights, also scored the Crimson's fourth goal in the middle stanza when Dave Morse was on the spot to slap in a pass from Ikauniks at 11:46.

There was a fair number of Brown fans in the crowd of 1,200 and the cheers they gave center Gene Kinasewich whenever he failed to take the puck around everyone attests to Gene's growing reputation in college hockey.

Gene, on one of these many spectacular windups, set up the team's second goal at 17:20 of the first period when he shot a last-second pass to Bill Beckett, who scored. Defenseman Ron Thomson netted the third goal by stealing the puck in the center zone and shooting from inside the blue line.

Tim Taylor got his sixteenth goal of the season on a pass fror Kinasewich in the final period before Brown had spoiled goalie Godfrey Wood's shutout with a breakaway. Taylor played with seven stitches over his left eye after a first period mishap.

Probably the most frightening news for Crimson fans at Watson Rink yesterday was the 11-1 victory by the Brown freshmen. It was engineered by two young Canadians, Terry Chapman and Leon Bryant, who together have amassed 61 points in nine games this season.