The British Chess Championships had to go on-line this year due to the Covid pandemonium. One of our members entered the Over 65 section, which comprised 7 rounds over 10 days (with a 3 day gap for Christmas).Here is the final crosstable:
Here is George’s game from the final round. A draw would have sufficed to guarantee first place, so a boring, safe game was the target.
Hardly the intended boring, safe game!
Congratulations to George for winning the title!
This year’s Christmas Handicap will take place on January 6th, using Zoom and Lichess (which allows different time limits for White/Black).
The prize, as usual, is the coveted Harvey-Ironside Shield. For previous winners of this prestigious trophy, please see the Honours Board
Just a reminder that Crowthorne Chess Club’s weekly Zoom meeting will go ahead this Wednesday (23rd), and we are planning to have one in the following week too (28th).
Many thanks to George Green, Crowthorne Chess CLub’s 4NCL on-line captain, for providing this summary.
4NCL OTB has been going for over 25 years, which has given all of the teams time to find their way into the correct divisions for their strength. But this was only the 2nd season of 4NCL on-line. Furthermore there has been a huge influx of new teams, so these are still finding their correct division.
This was Crowthorne CC’s first foray into on-line chess. Our 2 teams were placed in Divisions 5 and 6 (the lowest division).
I think Division 6 worked quite well, as it is run on a Swiss basis, so Crowthorne 2 was always playing opponents on the same number of points. However some of our matches were still quite tough. We finished 58th out of 68 teams on 4 points (1W, 2D, 4L). All of our regular 2nd team players won at least 1 game. Thanks also to Csilla who stepped in at short notice when Seyon was ill.
Our 1st team had a bumpier ride. Division 5 is split into 4 groups of 8 teams, run on an all-play-all basis. We won our group, but only had 2 opponent teams who gave us a good fight. The other 5 teams were somewhat weaker than us.
We got through to the semi-final, but then encountered a stronger team, who beat us on Tuesday (1st December).
I believe that placed us 4th out of 32 teams (TBC as the 4NCL tie break rules are a bit beyond me). We have been promoted to Division 4.
The response to my request for players was good each time (thanks – makes the captain’s job easier), so I was able to spread the games around quite fairly with each of us playing 4, 5 or 6 games.
Following their win against Bishop Knights on Tuesday, Crowthorne 1 emerged top of Group D in Division 5, finishing just ahead of local rivals Farnham. Promotion (or otherwise) will now be determined by subsequent playoff matches against other group winners.
The table is as follows:
Full results and table can be found on the 4NCL web site
Here are the results from Round 5 of the Online 4NCL competition, played yesterday (October 20th).
Crowthorne 1 beat the 2nd strongest team in the division, so we remain clearly in 1st place in Division 5.
Crowthorne 2 had a harder time of it, and lost their match 0.5 – 3.5
Full results and tables can be found on the 4NCL web site
Our friends at Camberley Chess Club have set Sunday November 1st as the date for this year’s Keith Richardson Memorial. It is a one day rapidplay tournament which will be held online at lichess.org. For more details please visit the Camberley Chess Club page.
Crowthorne 1 again won their match 4-0 in the 3rd round of the 4NCL Online League. Our next match in 2 weeks’ time is against Bude Surfers, who had John Nunn on board 1 this week!
Crowthorne 2 managed their first draw this time:
Full results for the current online season (Season 2) can be found on the 4NCL website. Crowthorne 1 & 2 play in divisions 5 and 6 respectively.
The 2nd round of the 4NCL On-line tournament took place this week.
Once again the Crowthorne 1 team won 4-0. We lead our section. Our key match will be against the other strong team in our section (Farnham A) on October 20th. It is probable that the winner of that match will go through to the play offs for promotion.
Crowthorne 2 did better than in round 1 but still lost. We perhaps had higher expectations before the match based on the 4NCL gradings, but we subsequently understood that our opponents were a team of Scottish juniors with very few ECF graded games to their names. Their lichess grades were somewhat higher. In round 3 we’ll be paired against a team with 2 losses!
Congratulations to Richard for winning the Khyber Cup this year. This year the event was held online, using a slightly faster time control of 10m+5s for the entire game rather than the traditional 20m+10s used for the over the board event. Thanks are due to Jonathan Welton, who organised the event using lichess.org as the platform.
Richard won the 5 round Swiss tournament with 4.5 points, a full point ahead of Harvey Duckers and Mark Taylor, who shared second place with 3.5 points.
Full details of the tournament can be found at the event on lichess.org.
Richard’s best game was probably his first round encounter against Jonathan. Jonathan got a slightly passive position out of the opening, and it is impressive to see how Richard managed to gradually increase his advantage to a winning one, whilst giving his opponent virtually no counterplay, despite Jonathan’s best efforts.
As can be seen in the Honours Board Page, Richard is no stranger to winning the Khyber competition!