Online 4NCL – Season 4 Round 4

Here are Crowthorne’s results in yesterday’s Round 4 matches in the Online 4NCL. A welcome first win for Crowthorne 1, and Crowthorne 2 did very well against much higher-rated opposition.

Derek played a fine attacking game on the black side of a Benoni Defence:

Online 4NCL – Season 4 Round 2

Here are Crowthorne’s results for the second round of the online 4NCL:

As can be seen, both teams went down to substantially higher rated opposition.

However, there was one highlight, and that was Mark’s sparkling win in his game. In the position shown, White has a forced sequence that leads to a winning attack:

Online 4NCL – Season 4 begins!

Season 4 of the online 4NCL (The Four Nations Chess League) started on Tuesday, and Crowthorne Chess Club has two teams playing – Crowthorne 1 in Division 3 and Crowthorne 2 in Division 5.

Crowthorne 1’s start to the new season was rather inauspicious, as they went down 1.5 – 2.5 despite significantly out-rating their opponents Bristol Cabot Blackbeards.

Crowthorne 2, on the other hand, achieved the reverse result by beating their opponents by the same margin, despite being out-rated by over 300 points on average.

Full results, tables etc can be found on the 4NCL website.

Online 4NCL Season 3 Roundup

Our Online 4NCL Team Captain George Green has provided the following summary of Crowthorne’s season.

The 4NCL season 3 has now finished for Crowthorne. 

Our 1st team didn’t gain automatic qualification to Division3, finishing 3rd in their group. Out 2nd team finished 59th out of 72 teams in Division 5.

We had a squad of 13 players, which comfortably supported 2 teams, with an average availability of 10.5 people for 8 boards. This meant that I had to “rest” one or more players each time, but I shared this around as fairly as I could.

It was good to see one or two of our junior members winning games against higher rated opponents. In fact Dylan won 3 such games with his entertaining play!!

The 45+15 time control is a bit quick for some our older, slower thinking players (me), but offers the juniors a chance to spend more time on their moves, which they’ll need to do as they improve. I’m not sure that they all made the most of this opportunity!

4NCL season 3 starts on August 24th. It is too early to say what the club’s position will be on OTB vs. Online chess, until we see how Covid goes.

Online 4NCL Round 7

Crowthorne’s last matches in Season 3 of the Online 4NCL took place yesterday, with the following results:

Other results in the round meant that if Crowthorne 1 had won their match, they would have achieved automatic promotion, but unfortunately we finished just short of this goal.

Online 4NCL Round 6

Crowthorne played in Round 6 on Tuesday 6h April (with apologies for the belated update). Despite substantially outgrading their opponents Crowthorne 1 drew their match against Rugeley Rangers. This is a bit of a slip (in more than one sense of the word as a mouse-slip played a crucial part in one of the games!) which means that our promotion prospects depend on results in the final round.

Crowthorne 2 lost 3-1 against their higher rated opponents, congratulations to Aarav for winning.

Online 4NCL Round 5

Crowthorne Chess Club had another good round in the online 4NCL yesterday, with the first team just winning their match against St Albans 2, and the second team drawing against RCSI Team 2:

(Derek’s opponent was actually C. Pines due to a late change)

This leaves the first team in second place (1st equal on match points, 2nd on game points) in their group in Division 4, and the second team mid-table in Division 7.

Full results and tables for all rounds are available on the 4NCL web site

Correction: As there was, unfortunately, a default by Crowthorne 2’s opponents, the match is scored 2-1.5 in Crowthorne’s favour, and counts as a win.

Online 4NCL Round 4

Good results for both Crowthorne teams yesterday (9th March), both winning 4-0. Well done everybody!

As can be seen Crowthorne 1 substantially out-rated their opponents. It’s obviously still a good result, which puts us equal first in our group in division 4.

Crowthorne 2’s match was much closer on rating, and the result was the first win of the season.

Full results and tables etc can be found on the 4NCL website (see divisions 4 and 7 for the Crowthorne teams).

Online 4NCL Round 3

A good result for our 1st team. Unfortunately Derek’s opponent didn’t turn up, so the match is actually scored -0.5 – 4.0 in Crowthorne’s favour.

After three rounds, this leaves Crowthorne 1 on 4 match points out of a possible 6 in their eight-team group in Division 4. This puts us in equal second but with four rounds to go it is obviously early days yet.

Our 2nd team lost, but Dylan won and Teah managed an amazing stalemate!!

Final position of J Leake – Teah de Silva. Black to move!

Full results and tables can be found on the 4NCL web site.