Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Club Championship - the semi-finals

The Club Championship has been running very nicely, producing some unusual pairings and some interesting games. I don't know how the stronger players view it - ordeal or doddle - but speaking as a weaker player it's always instructive to take on some one stronger, and sometimes the wheel seems to turn on such subtleties rather than obvious wizardry. We are now at the exciting juncture of the semi-finals when the four top seeds - yes, no upsets in the seeding - will play with both colours against their opponent. See the Club Championship page for how it's gone so far.

The other tournaments are also coming along nicely with all results up to date.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

On the brink...

  Two good wins last week. On Thursday we overcame Horsham. Winners Luke, Brian, Geoff and John. On the Saturday Hastings' 2 were our opposition. Wins from Geoff and myself were instrumental in our victory. Now this Thursday we are on the brink. Incidentally the last time Brighton/Brighton & Hove won the league with a 100 per cent score was the 1990/91 Season. Will we make history Thursday? I hope so.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Thursday bridge

Space will be limited tomorrow as we have a fifth team match and part of a bridge match going on upstairs. The bridge will mean the back room is unavailable for internal matches. The bar will be available for friendlies if we need to have quiet in the front room, depending on whether any matches have been arranged. (With apologies from Julian for the late notice.)

Friday, March 9, 2012

Holcombe Handicap

This knockout tournament will commence after Easter and last for 3/4 months. A time handicap is calculated depending on grade difference. This enables players, of different strengths, to hopefully have more of an even game.
It is a light-hearted tournament. The results of each game are not sent for grading. However Charles Holcombe has kindly offered a prize of £75 for the winner and £25 for the runner-up.
It is a knockout tournament and therefore players who enter, must be prepared to complete their games by a definite date.
A list for names is on the club noticeboard, or if one wishes one may enter by sending me an email.
Closing date for entry is Thursday 5th April.

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Game viewer

Hi All,

I had some problems embedding a game in this blog, but it seems to work now. I think the problem was that the viewer does not support 'non-standard' .pgn features such as variations, some points to note are:

1) Don't put variations in the pgn file, keep it simple, annotations go between {squiggly brackets}
2) On our resources page, click the large grey 'IMPORT PGN' button.
3) Paste PGN into box
4) If .pgn import is successful it should return to the viewer front page
5) Next to 'IMPORT' button you will now see a box with the code you need to copy, check the 'small' tickbox to display as below, otherwise it is too big for the page.
6) Copy code, then when you are writing the blog entry click the 'Edit HTML' tab BEFORE you paste the code/link int the post.
7) NOTE that if you 'Preview' the post the replay board will be visible but will not replay (this confused me for a while!)



1

A nice option to get the bigger size is to select the pop-out version which give a link as below, remember to pase the code in 'Edit HTML' mode !

Nigel Short-Erwin L'Ami

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Geekdom

Thanks, Kev. Didn't realise you'd have to have your own very cool blog to pull this off, which now has its own link on the Links page. Hopefully the problems with the game viewer can be sorted as it would be excellent to have a Members' Games archive on the blog. I have labelled yours as a start. This is what the Club Championship is all about (and winning it, of course). Meanwhile there's a forum for debate on chess/tech with the blogger on hand, a subject many of us find nearly (more?) as challenging as chess.

Friday, March 2, 2012

Club Championship match

I had any epic struggle against Geoffrey James last night, the result went with expectations but despite being quite tired (or perhaps it helped !?) I gave my opponent a tough time, as he graciously admitted afterwards.

Sue asked if I minded posting the game online so with my opponent's consent I have, unfortunately I couldn't get the game viewer to work in Blogger so I have posted it on my new(ish) blog site, click here to see it.

The comments are very much from my viewpoint, so please excuse any excited egotism but I have rarely - if ever - played this well and am keen to work out how to do it again! I had vowed to stop using computers for analysis but in this case I couldn't resist, so specific move suggesitons come from Houdini, though Geoff accurately pin-pointed the critical points for me in his post-game comments.