Holcombe Handicap

More details of the above tournament are now diplayed on the club notice-board.
Eighteen people have entered the tournament. Names are placed in alphabetical order. The names of players are shown below so that people can start to arrange their games.
There are two preliminary rounds, to be completed please by Saturday 5th May.
Preliminary round : 1) P. Benson v M. Cain. 2) N. Tasker v O. Weiss.
Please choose colours and your time handicaps have ben calculated and shown against names on the notice-board.
Round 1 : Please complete by Saturday 2nd June.
a) Winner of P. Benson v M. Cain play A. Caswill.
b) M. Cedrez v M. Chou.
c) S. Chadwick v R. Counsell
d) R. Davies v A. De. Silver.
e) K. Gee v C. Holcombe.
f) R. Jones v C. Rabey.
g) A. Shoulders v J. Smuts.
h) A. Stanton play winner of N. Tasker v O. Weiss.
Note due to the generosity of Charles the winner will receive at the AGM a cheque for £75 and the runner-up a cheque for £25. Not obligatory but the remaining contestants will gratefully receive free drinks.

Happy Easter!

Congratulations to Andrew Shoulders on winning the U60 grading prize on 2.5/5 in the U120 section of the Coulsdon Easter Congress (£35).

We are open as usual on Easter Saturday.

Woodpusher Rapidplay

Julian (of the Avenue Bridge Club and Woodpushers Chess Club) is organising a rapidplay tournament to take place over two consecutive Tuesday evenings. The details are as follows:

WOODPUSHERS  CHESS  CLUB                    

Avenue Bridge Club, 15 Third Avenue,

Hove, BN3 2PB.  Tel: 01273 775752.

Email: AvenueBridgeClub@aol.com

1^st Tuesday Night Rapidplay

Six round swiss rapidplay, held over two Tuesday evenings. Advance registration by email preferred – pay on evening.

Tuesdays 29^th May and 5^th June.

Schedule

6.45 – 7.15 pm Payment taken from registered players.

7.15 – 7.29 pm Payment and registration from those previously  

 unregistered; first come, first served.

7.30 – 10.45 pm 3 x 30 minutes rapidplay games.

Entry fee £10.      Students/Juniors £7.     One night only £5.  

Unregistered surcharge £1 extra.

Players joining on 5^th June assumed to have 1½ points.

We are hoping to make this the first of a series of swiss rapidplay tournaments, designed not just to give players competitive opportunities, but to support the Avenue Bridge Club and both Brighton and Woodpushers Chess Clubs. Half the monies taken will be given back as prizes – prize list to be published when registration is complete.

Not wanting to be overly ambitious with our first event of this nature, capacity will be limited to the first 30 registered players – we may review this after the first event. So the answer is clear …

Do not delay – register today!

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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!)

Play Online Chess

[Event "Corus (Group B)"]
[Site "Wijk aan Zee NED"]
[Date "2009.01.19"]
[Round "3"]
[White "Nigel Short"]
[Black "Erwin L'Ami"]
[Result "1-0"]
[WhiteELO "?"]
[BlackELO "?"]
[EventDate "2009.01.17"]
[ECO "C48"]
[WhiteElo "2663"]
[BlackElo "2603"]
[PlyCount "37"]

1. e4 e5 {Comments work} 2. Nf3 Nf6 3. Nc3 Nc6 4. Bb5 Nd4 5. Nxe5 Nxb5 6.
Nxb5 c6 7. Nc3 Qe7 8. Nf3 Nxe4 9. O-O Nxc3 10. dxc3 d5 11. Bg5 Qd6 12. Re1+
Be6 13. Nd4 c5 14. Nxe6 fxe6 15. Qh5+ g6 {comment test} 16. Qg4 Kf7 17. c4 d4
18. Qf3+ Kg8 19. Bf6 1-0

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

[Event "Corus (Group B)"]
[Site "Wijk aan Zee NED"]
[Date "2009.01.19"]
[Round "3"]
[White "Nigel Short"]
[Black "Erwin L'Ami"]
[Result "1-0"]
[WhiteELO "?"]
[BlackELO "?"]
[EventDate "2009.01.17"]
[ECO "C48"]
[WhiteElo "2663"]
[BlackElo "2603"]
[PlyCount "37"]

1. e4 e5 {Comments work} 2. Nf3 Nf6 3. Nc3 Nc6 4. Bb5 Nd4 5. Nxe5 Nxb5 6.
Nxb5 c6 7. Nc3 Qe7 8. Nf3 Nxe4 9. O-O Nxc3 10. dxc3 d5 11. Bg5 Qd6 12. Re1+
Be6 13. Nd4 c5 14. Nxe6 fxe6 15. Qh5+ g6 {comment test} 16. Qg4 Kf7 17. c4 d4
18. Qf3+ Kg8 19. Bf6 1-0

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.

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.

Hi all,  I am hoping to make it to the club tomorrow night, if any of my possible ladder opponents are planning to be there it's about time I actually played a game.

b+h tm4 v. hastings3 16th feb 2012

hi all, carl here. i'd like to say a massive thankyou to the members of team 4 who turned out last night to face the strongest team that hastings 3 have put out so far this season. despite being heavily outgraded on several boards, b+h tm4 won the match 3-2 with 2 draws and 2 wins! so, a big thanks to martin roe, callum brewer, anthony stanton, and kevin gee. this result puts us top of division 3 and gives us a great chance to go on and win promotion to division 2. well done!!

Website news

The Ladder Rapidplay competition listed on the Tournaments page is currently bang up to date, as is the contacts list, for anyone wishing to organise a game in advance. Plus you can now study how to set the digital clocks by downloading the manuals via the links on the Resources page.

Brighton and Gibraltar Internationals

If you can afford the time, don't forget the e2e4 Brighton International coming up in a couple of weeks. There are still places in the Major, ie everything U165.

If you can't manage that then enjoy the Gibraltar Chess Festival where the online coverage is very good indeed, probably because Simon Williams is the main anchor man. He has a fast, chatty pace and always a humorous edge, as well as a lightning grasp of the position. Looks like Brian Izzard's already there.

New halfyear grades are out

The new grades are out and on the club website Members page. The ECF reference numbers are interactive and take you back to the ECF website where you can now see the data on which the grades are based, ie who played whom, where and when. The prize for the biggest increase (if there was one) goes unsurprisingly to Callum with a giant leap of 35 points! Well done Callum.

Going digital

Recently we have added to our number of digital clocks. Paul Batchelor has written some guidelines to help with using them and I have added these to the website via a public link on the Tournaments page. Please also remember to check the Tournaments page for help with other interactive bits of the website.

Big chance to dumb-up on BB

As I'm sure you all know, every imaginable query has already been addressed on the Membership page of the website so that we now get almost none and a deal less work in answering them. However an unimaginable one occasionally arrives and one such arrived today. Well, we all know what fascinating characters chess players are:

Hi there,

Big Brother…is BACK FOR 2012!

I am contacting you from Endemoluk, we are currently in the process of casting Big Brother 2012 and I wanted to get in contact with you. Big Brother returns to our screens on Channel 5 in summer 2012 and we’re looking for vibrant and interesting characters to enter the house.

Big Brother is widening the search and, as ever, is keen to represent all aspects of society. I wanted to pass on my contact details for any of your members that might be interested in applying ?

If you are interested and would like more information you can contact us directly by emailing: frazeryorke@endemoluk.com We will try and reply to you but cannot guarantee that we will be able to reply to every message received.

Frazer Yorke
Assistant Producer
Big Brother 2012 Auditions

No guessing what we'd get up to to dispel the tedium in the house, but what would a lone chess player do?

Brighton&Hove 5 v Horsham 4

Tuesday 17th January:
A successful evening against a much stronger side resulted in a draw.
Terry Brown with white, opened with The London System. Julie Denning ( 135) lost on time.
Rob Counsell played Roger Waddingham ( 134 ) and very unfortunately due to time pressure lost the game, when he could have spotted a mate in one. He was stamping the floor of the car all the way home!!
Sue played a strong even game against Ron Fletcher ( 127) which resulted in a draw.
I played the centre counter against Richard Barrowclough( 125) and he finally lost on time.
Adrian Hickling played a good start against Richard Moorhouse ( 121) but unfortunately he lost after a good struggle.

Brighton & Hove 1 v Crowborough 1

  First to finish was John with a win against Bob Elliston. The opening was unorthodox but resembled a Blackmar-Diemar. Geoff's game had been a Catalan. He was able to defend with accuracy and the game ended in a draw. Luke had played a Sicilian Taimanov. Despite getting into what appeared to me, a spot of bother, he was able to eventually draw. Brian's game had been a Center Counter Opening. Despite winning a pawn, his opponent had compensation in the Two Bishops. This proved to be sufficient and the game was duly drawn. Last to finish was my own game. This time i was able to contribute more than just 'the winning of the toss'. Infact i lost the toss, but was able to prevail in a Sicilan defence. Another satisfying performance in the Mid-Sussex League.