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.

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.

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.