Five Minute Blitz & League AGM Date

Pictures from our five minute handicap blitz. It was fast and furious last night with 5 minutes on the clock and all play all and in some cases players starting a rook down! This produced some surprising results which added to the fun of the evening. Thanks go to Ed Goodwin for organising the evening and to Lana Sanchez Nasibova for all the pictures and acting as chief arbiter and scorer. Scores as follows:
Aran Paul 10.5
Ed Goodwin 10
Wesley Beeston 9
Dave Filer 7.5
Mike Johnson 7
Margarita 6
Josh Pink 6.5
Simon W 4
John Loughnane 3
John Conway 3
Dave Ireland 5
Seb 1
Paul Sweatman 4.5

Next week the plan is for players to bring in some of their games and Dave Ireland and the A Team will provide some expert analysis and hints and tips on how you could improve your chess.

A note for your diaries next week is the League AGM. Wednesday 27th June at Warwick University. Meeting Room 2.

7.30pm start. 

What is Josh thinking in this picture ? 

 Looks like John has scared off his opponent!

 Our two resident Grandmasters. Rumour has it Magnus Carlsen has refused to play them for fear of losing his world championship title.

 I do not like that look John is giving Wes?!

We had a new player come along last night, he wasn't very good though, so cant really see him carrying on with chess. I did give him a few tips though to try and help him improve. .

Blitz Chess on Tuesday 19th June

Next Tuesday, following on from our successful evening with doubles Chess 960, Ed and the A team have come up with a very imaginative way to play 5 minute chess. 

It is called handicap chess - Here are the rules as devised by Ed :-

For the handicap blitz it will be 5 minutes each for a game.

The interesting bit is the handicaps. 

Players will fall into 4 groups based on ECF grade

Group 1 Under 70

Group 2 70 – 109

Group 3 110 – 149

Group 4 150 and over 

When 2 players in the same group both players play with a full set of pieces.

When the 2 players are one group apart the stronger player has a Knight or bishop removed

When the 2 players are 2 groups apart the stronger player has a rook removed

When the 2 players are 3 groups apart the stronger player has 2 minor pieces removed. 

So for example if Dave Ireland played Margarita Dave would have to have 2 minor pieces removed. 

When material is removed the stronger player can choose which pieces to remove e.g. Dave could choose to remove both knights or the King’s knight and the Queen’s bishop etc. 

Players will do their own pairings as long as they don’t play the same person more than once.

This promises to be another different evening with lots of "fun chess" Open to all members and guests.

Chess 960 Evening

Here are some pics from our Chess 960 evening. It certainly was a "different" evening to a normal club night and there was lots of puzzled faces and scratching of heads - and how does castling work in chess 960? Who knows! It was a really fun night and Thanks must go to Ed Goodwin for organising the event and to the A team players for the suggestion.

More events to follow over the next few months.!

Another Event for Tuesday 12th June

Hi All,

Due to the resounding success of last Tuesday's simultaneous event with our resident "Simultaneous Expert" Dave Ireland, Ed Goodwin and the A Team players have kindly agreed to organise

a "Doubles Fischer Random Tournament" 

Now, I can already hear you saying "what the heck is a Doubles Fischer Random Tournament" and I must admit I had to scurry to Wikipedia to look up what it is all about. 

In Ed's words here is brief outline of how we see the evening :-

2 players in each team taking it in turns to move.

Starting time 8p.m. Number of rounds 3. 

The games we will be playing is called Fischer random or Chess 960. This is a chess variant where the pieces are set up at random on the 1^st and 8^th ranks. Otherwise rules of chess are the same as a normal game except castling which will require some explanation on the night.

 For anyone wanting to prepare look at Chess 960 on Wikapedia. 

I suggest the following :-

Clocks set to 10 minutes per team.

Teams  created by splitting players into 2 groups by strength and picking 1 player from each group.

Starting positions drawn from a set of preprinted   positions .

We should have 4 teams ideally, depending on numbers we may have some teams with  one player or some with 3 players. 

There is much scope for confusion and I may have overlooked something major but hopefully this just adds to the fun.

This is another new event we have never tried, however reading the Wikipedia text, it looks like all those long winter nights you spent studying openings will not help you

Here is a link to the Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960

Chess960 Randomizing the main pieces had long been known as Shuffle Chess; however, Chess960 introduces restrictions on t...

The evening promises to be something very different to a normal "club evening" and I suspect will raise lots of questions and scratching of heads  

As normal, for all club events, the competition is free to enter and open to all club members and guests.

If you could get to the club for 7.30pm this will then give us time to organise teams, explain the rules! ready for a start at 8 pm. 

We do have another Simultaneous event planned in four or five weeks time, however, if anyone has any suggestion for future events please let me know and we will gladly organise something if it is possible.

Finally, here is a small excerpt from Wikipedia to whet your appetite 

Chess960, also called Fischer Random Chess (originally Fischerandom), is a variant of chess invented and advocated by former world chess champion Bobby Fischer, announced publicly on June 19, 1996, in Buenos Aires, Argentina.^[1][2] It employs the same board and pieces as standard chess, but the starting position of the pieces on the players' home ranks is randomized. The random setup renders the prospect of obtaining an advantage through the memorization of opening lines impracticable, compelling players to rely instead on their talent and creativity.

Randomizing the main pieces had long been known as Shuffle Chess; however, Chess960 introduces restrictions on the randomization, "preserving the dynamic nature of the game by retaining bishops of opposite colours for each player and the right to castle for both sides".^[3] The result is 960 unique possible starting positions

My simul display

As mentioned by Simon, I conducted my first ever simultaneous display on Tuesday, which was very enjoyable, albeit more difficult than I probably envisaged.
Upon arriving, there was a pretty full room, with about 20 people already there. There was a full mixture of 1st, 2nd and 3rd division players from our club, and even Warwickshire Champion, Henrik Stepanyan. He was participating to, amongst 16 players in total. I was already thinking this was not going to be easy!
We began, and for the first hour, there was a cathedral like hush. It all seemed so serious, and slightly daunting at first. For a while, nothing too drastic was happening, although that would soon change.
The first result came by way of a blunder by myself, as I missed a knight fork that netted Ed Goodwin a queen for a piece. Ed was planning to give details of this game on a report here, but he's instead going to include it in his soon to be released book "Ed Goodwin's Greatest Games"; available online and in bookstores, in the near future.
I also had a very eventful game with Margarita. Again, a blunder by me of similar proportions, led to me having my queen pinned against my king by her bishop. Things were not looking good. However, in the resulting position, I had very active pieces fortunately, and some potential threats of my own. I had possible discovered attacks against her king in the air, as well as forks available. Margarita still had possible tactical opportunities as well. In the end, I won this game, although not until we'd both had a roller coaster of a game. Forks, pins, discovered attacks, loose pieces, double attacks, it was all happening here, for both of us. Even near the end, I managed to walk into another fork, but luckily still had a winning position, just !
I was pleased to get a draw with Henrik. I tried a Danish gambit, which Henrik declined with an early thematic d5 counter. It transposed to a position similar to Scandinavian defence games (after 1e4 d5). The position seemed reasonably level out of the opening, but after a brief flurry of tactical exchanges, we reached a rook ending, in which I felt my pawns were more vulnerable than Henrik's. However, Henrik offered a draw, which I quickly accepted. To be honest, I think Henrik was going easy on me a bit in this game, judging by some of my past experiences playing him, (which have not usually gone in my favour).
Amongst quite a few mistakes, I did manage to win some games reasonably smoothly, and even threw in a couple of successful bishop sac's at various stages of the evening. In the end, I won 10, drew 2 (the other draw versus my team mate, Bernard), and lost 2, (Simon Weaver won against me, as well as Ed). 2 other games had to be abandoned, unfortunately, as they were both quite interestingly poised.
One thing I did notice was how much easier it seemed to be once a few games were finished, and I was able to get around the group very quickly when only a few games remained. I think it took some of the remaining players a bit by surprise, as they'd had a good 5 minutes on each move in the early stages.
Anyway, I can't really mention all the games, as there would be too many, but if anyone wants to mention their game, or a particular position that occurred, let me or Simon know, and we'll look into publishing it.

Dave

Simultaneous Results

Yesterday evening we held our first simultaneous display and it was a huge success with 16 players taking part.

I would like to Thank Dave Ireland for volunteering to do the simultaneous, as the evening proved very popular and many club members said how much they enjoyed taking part.

There were some excellent games and the final result for Dave Ireland was:-

10 Wins
2 Draws
2 Losses
2 Abandoned games

Dave has said he will try and do a fuller report on all the games which I will post here when I receive the report from Dave.

Results:
Ed Goodwin 1
Paul Sweatman 0
Allan Franklin 0
Bernard Charnley .5
Georgi  0
Roy Watson 0
John Conway ret.
Gordon Cornell 0
Henrik .5
Margarita Sanchez 0
Bava 0
Mike Johnson ret.
Simon Weaver 1
Dave Adams 0
John Loughnane 0
Wesley Beeston 0

Here a few pics from last night ... courtesy of Lana Sanchez

 Is this when John asked for a cheeky draw?!