British On-line Chess Champion (Over 65)

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!

4NCL on-line season 2 summary

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.