Junior Online 4NCL
4nclresults.co.uk/2023-24/media/kids/9th/prog-div4.html(opens in a new tab)
Crowthorne Chess Club has a team in Division 4 of the Junior Online 4NCL competition.
In this format, teams play in a seven round Swiss, with each player playing two games against the same opponent. The time rate is 10 minutes for the game, plus 5 seconds increment each move.
Crowthorne Juniors won their latest match:
This means that Crowthorne has won two out of the first three matches and stand in 15th place out of 34 teams.
Full details at the 4NCL website.
UK Chess Challenge at Crowthorne Chess Club
Once again, John Upham is organising a UK Chess Challenge (UKCC) competition for juniors at Crowthorne Chess Club.
In case you don’t know, the UKCC is a series of competitions for juniors, starting with qualifying tournaments and then going on to Megafinals, Gigafinals and Terafinals. More details can be found on the Delancey UKCC web site.
In the first week we already have 19 entrants signed up for the competition, more may well enter in later weeks. You can follow the progress of the competition on chess-results which has full details of entrants, results, individual performance etc.
Online 4NCL Round 1
Round 1 of the 9th Season of the 4NCL took place on Tuesday, and Crowthorne started with a win against the Colchester JFF B team.
We outrated our opponents, but a good start to the season nonetheless. All results, tables etc can be found at the 4ncl website.
OTB 4NCL weekend 2 2023/2024
Rounds 3-4 of the over-the-board 4NCL have completed, with Crowthorne Chess Club’s two teams competing over the last two weekends. The B team played over 6-7 January and the A team on Jan 13-14.
Both teams won their Saturday matches, but then followed with losses on Sunday. This was particularly unfortunate for the A Team who came close to winning a couple of their games, but without quite managing to press their advantage for a win. Crowthorne A lost the match 2.5 – 3.5. To be fair, their opponents (Sussex Martlets) also came close to winning one or two of their other games, and after four rounds they lead the division with 4 wins out of 4.
Richard had a tremendously complicated game, with an “unclear” assessment being reasonable for most of the game. Then his opponent decided that his king was safer out of the centre, and he castled (on move 29!) into a strong attack. Neither player could see a forcing line for Richard (playing White), and the game soon ended in a repetition. At that point, Richard was playing on increment and got down to 1-2 seconds on a couple of occasions.
In the cold light of day, and with access to a strong engine, we can see that White did have a win available, although this was also missed by players and kibitzers alike in the post-mortem. The lines are quite pretty, though, so you may like to play through them.