Sunday, 10 November 2013

Suffolk League latest

The situation in all three divisions of the Suffolk League is extremely tight, with no team emerging as clear front runners.

These are the latest league tables:

DIVISION 1


Team Played Points
Bury St Edmunds B 3 6
Ipswich A 3 6
Manningtree A 2
Bury St Edmunds A 3
Ipswich B 3 5
Ipswich C 2 4

If Ipswich C were to win their outstanding match against Manningtree, they would leap from the foot of the table to the top!

DIVISION 2

Team Played Points
Sudbury 3
Ipswich D 3 6
Stowmarket A 2
Bury St Edmunds C 3
Adastral Park 3 5
Saxmundham A 2 3

Stowmarket A appear to be best placed, with a match in hand.

DIVISION 3


Team Played Points
Stowmarket Rooks 4
Clacton 3 8
Bury St Edmunds D 4
Ipswich E 3 7
Manningtree B 3 6
Felixstowe 3 5
Saxmundham B 2 1

Five of the eleven matches played so far have ended in a 2-2 draw.


The following players have 100% records:

Division 1:   Leon Burnett (Manningtree); Silas Peck (Ipswich); John Feavyour (Bury St Edmunds)

Division 2:   John Peters (Bury St Edmunds); John McAllister (Adastral Park); Rob Hayhurst (Stowmarket); Alonso Paez (Ipswich)

Division 3:   Roger Smith (Ipswich); John Price (Manningtree); Phil Hopkins (Felixstowe)


Saturday, 9 November 2013

Flashback to 1964

This photo from 1964 appeared in yesterday's East Anglian Daily Times.

Does anyone have any idea who the players are?

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In the first round of the World Chess Championship, played this morning, Carlsen and Anand reached a draw (by repetition) after only 16 moves.   To view the game, click here.


Friday, 8 November 2013

European Team Championships start today

Staying on the International front, the European Team Chess Championships commenced today in Warsaw.   England are fielding two teams, in the Open and the Women's sections.   The men are seeded fifth of 38 teams entered, whilst the women are 23rd out of 32 teams.

As reported a couple of weeks ago, Women's Grandmaster and International Master Dagne Ciuksyte from Martlesham is top board for the England Women's team.   She did not play in Round 1 today, against a strong French team, seeded seventh, when England lost 4 - 0.

The men fared much better, although against the local Polish third team (!).   They won 3 - 1, with Luke McShane and Nigel Short drawing on the top boards, and Gawain Jones and David Howell winning on boards 3 & 4.   Top board Michael Adams was rested for Round 1.

You can watch live games here.   In Round 2 tomorrow, England face Greece in the Open, whilst the women play Poland II.

The event continues until 18 November, so there's going to be a feast of chess over the next few weeks, with the Anand-Carlsen match starting tomorrow.


Thursday, 7 November 2013

World Chess Championship - opening ceremony today

The Opening Ceremony of the World Chess Championship took place this morning in Chennai, India.   As everyone knows, the challenger Magnus Carlsen (Norway) takes on the current champion Vishy Anand (India).

There are a number of websites available.

The Opening Ceremony and press conference can be viewed here.   The video broadcast is well worth watching, if only for the musical accompaniment and the Indian flavours.

The first match is on Saturday, when Carlsen will have the White pieces.   Live games can be viewed here on the official website.

There will be live streaming of the match on YouTube.

There will also be a live webcast on Russian TV.

If you can understand Norwegian, you could try this site too.

The playing schedule allows for two games on successive days, followed by a rest day.   This changes after Match 11, when there will be a further rest day before Match 12.   If tie-breaks are necessary, they will take place after a further rest day.





So these are the dates when matches are taking place:
Saturday 9
Sunday 10
Tuesday 12
Wednesday 13
Friday 15
Saturday 16
Monday 18
Tuesday 19
Thursday 21
Friday 22
Sunday 24
Tuesday 26

Tie-breaks and the closing ceremony will take place on Thursday 28 November.

Remember that the games start at 09.30 GMT, which is 15.00 in Chennai.





Wednesday, 6 November 2013

Online chess

The following article was written by Steve Lovell, Secretary of the Bury St Edmunds Chess Club, for the club's website (in March 2013):

Online chess has good points and bad points.   Let's start with the bad points.

*   It can be a terrible time sink.   Be careful of too many late (k)nights!
*   Playing on a screen rather than over the board takes some getting used to.   Have you ever played chess against your computer?   It feels much the same to begin with.
*   You can pick up bad habits.   Most online chess is blitz chess (or faster), making it difficult to play carefully.   If that makes its way to your over the board play, you won't be very popular with your team captain.
*   There are quite a few cheats around.   I'm not sure I've run into any, but there are some unscrupulous players out there who will put your moves into their chess computer and play their computer's moves against you.   You might be playing against Fritz (or another powerful chess engine) without realising!

In my view the good points outweigh the bad:
*   It can be tremendous fun.
*   Unlike playing against a computer, your opponents will make mistakes.
*   You can get lots of practice for a new opening in a short space of time.
*   If you find yourself running out of time in over the board play, online play may help you learn to play a little faster (when required).
*   Play on the right websites, and you could find yourself playing against a GM.
*   If you don't like the tight time controls, several sites allow 'non-live' play.   It works in a similar way to correspondence chess.

There are lots of places to play chess online.   One of my favourites is Chess.com.   You can join for free (or get paid membership for extra benefits and the removal of adverts).   The site allows both live and non-live play, and you can search for opponents based on their rating.   The site also has lots of extra learning resources including puzzles, tutorials, articles and videos.   At the time of writing Chess.com has 6,819,325 members, ranging from complete beginners to Grand Masters.   They have team matches (I'm a member of two teams), tournaments, and an active online community.   They've also made most of this available via their (free) iPhone and Android apps.


Tuesday, 5 November 2013

Foreign words in chess

"I tried to fianchetto, but his zwischenzug put me in zugzwang until he made a fingerfehler leaving his Queen en prise."

OK, chess is an international game, played in every country.   The World Chess Federation is known by its French initials - FIDE - Fédération Internationale des Echecs.   But how many non-English terms associated with chess can you think of?   Here's a list for starters (do you know what they all mean?).   Let me know if you can think of any more.

Term Language
Fingerfehler German
Luft German
Patzer (German)
Zeitnot German
Zugswang German
Zwischenzug German
En passant French
En prise French
J'adoube French
Trébuchet French
Fianchetto Italian
Intermezzo Italian
Isolani (Italian)
Tempo Italian
Kibitzer Yiddish
Tabia (or Tabiya) Arabic

Where the language is shown in brackets, the word is related to that language, but not directly.   'Isolani' in Italian is the plural of 'isolano', yet is used in chess to denote a single isolated d-pawn.   'Patzer' probably stems from the German 'patzen', which means 'to bungle'.

I was going to add 'Desperado', but that seems to be an English word, although it looks as if it could be Italian.

There are of course plenty of openings with foreign names 'Ruy Lopez', 'Giuoco Piano' etc., but I'm only talking about chess terms, not openings or positions.   'Maroczy Bind' would therefore be excluded from the list.


Monday, 4 November 2013

Adam and Justin return from Germany

Adam Hunt and Justin Tan returned yesterday from Germany where they have been playing in a huge tournament at Bad Wiessee, with over 450 entrants in a single section.   The first four rounds for Adam were almost meaningless, as they were against much lower-rated opposition.   Although he won all these games, it only served to lower his rating performance for the whole event.   He scored 7 points out of 9, losing only once to a GM, with a rating performance of 2526.   He finished in 11th place, a point behind the eventual winner, GM Aleksander Delchev and six others on 7½ points.   Adam played four GMs (in rounds 5 to 8), scoring 2/4 against them.   He will certainly gain a few rating points, but unfortunately no GM norm (he needed a 2600 performance for that).

Meanwhile Justin Tan (2333) missed a couple of opportunities, losing in Round 5 to a 2064 and drawing with a 2086 in Round 8.   He still finished on 6 out of 9, although his rating performance was only 2230.

The final crosstable can be viewed here.


Sunday, 3 November 2013

Fixing the Fixtures

This, from Competitions Secretary Mike McNaughton:

There was a young man from Japan
Whose poetry just wouldn’t scan.
When told this was so,
He replied, “Yes, I know,
But I always try my best to fit as many words into the last line as I possibly can“

This rather silly limerick illustrates something that has been concerning me for some time and especially recently; namely that we seem to be trying to compress too much chess into too narrow a time frame.

Someone has to arrange the fixtures; and in Suffolk that person happens to be the Competitions Secretary.

I can remember the time, on Merseyside, when we had something called a 'fixtures meeting' (otherwise known as Pandemonium) when representatives from all clubs were present and the name of the game was to sort out all the fixtures on the night.   These meetings resembled a game of musical chairs, and experience taught me one thing - come prepared.   You needed a game plan; decide your ideal fixtures in advance, bag your opposite numbers early, and you could usually get your matches in some sort of decent order.

Realisation slowly dawned that this kind of free for all might not have been the most sensible way of dealing with fixture management, and the way forward might be to appoint an all-wise, all-knowing official whose responsibility it would be to arrange the fixtures in some sort of coherent order, in a way which would be fair to all concerned.

Problem solved.   Or was it?

It ought to be so easy.   For those who aren't aware of it, there exists something called the Hutton Pairing System.   This is mainly useful for jamboree events of the kind I used to organise in the North of England, but it can also be useful when arranging individual or team events.

So if you have, say, six teams, you allocate letters to each team, A to F.   Round 1 is A v E, B v D, F v C; Round 2 C v B, D v A, E v F and so on.  Easy-ozy.   You can access these pearls of wisdom by clicking here.

And in fact, with the second and third divisions, this system worked very well this year.   The difficulty comes with Division One.   The problem that I have (and not just me, it would be anyone who happened to fill the post of Competitions Secretary) in arranging fixtures for the Suffolk Chess Association (SCCA) is something like this.

It has been the practice that BACL fixtures are arranged first.   There are two good reasons for this; firstly, the BACL First Division is larger (7 teams as opposed to 6) and secondly, BACL have the ‘Cambridge problem‘ – namely that a University does not really get going until October.

So, for better or worse, the BACL fixtures secretary, or whatever you call him, has a blank sheet of paper to work with, and the SCCA counterpart has to fit in the fixtures in what is left over after his BACL equivalent has finished eating.   I wish to make it clear that this is no criticism of the BACL officials.   I think the problem is structural – too many fixtures and not enough time.

So the ‘problem' for me was that I was faced with a situation where quite a number of weeks were already occupied by BACL fixtures and no club, not even Bury, likes too many matches in the same week.   In addition I was asked to avoid fixtures which clashed with the BACL Roger Goldsmith Competition.   This request was subsequently modified to refer only to the higher rated of the two competitions.   However, there is a way round this difficulty; there is no overlap between the Roger Goldsmith and the SCCA League Cup, and that would suggest SCCA League Cup fixtures could, and should, be fixed for the same week as BACL Roger Goldsmith 1 fixtures.

The earliest realistic week for fixtures is the third week in September.   There are fourteen weeks between then and Christmas which are available for playing matches.   But the first of those weeks (third week in September) is the week of the Bury Jamboree.   In the period after Christmas the position is slightly better; there are 15.

To perform a draw with the Hutton system in a League with six teams you need five clear weeks, on the assumption that, say, A plays E, B plays D, F plays C in Round 1, and so on.   Where there are six or seven teams in a League, you need seven clear weeks.

So it’s a matter of simple arithmetic; if you have fourteen weeks, one of which has to be kept clear for the Bury Jamboree, two for Roger Goldsmith fixtures, and seven for BACL fixtures, there are only four for SCCA, and the figures do not stack up, although where the Cambridgeshire clubs are concerned there is no overlap.

This year we have a situation that Ipswich have three teams in Division 1, and Bury have three in Division 1 BACL.   The result of this is that, if you do a Hutton draw, it means that a Club which has three teams in the same division will have all its teams playing in the same week; and somehow, I think this is a situation which no club would welcome – not even Bury or Ipswich.

Summary

Ideally, I, as SCCA Competitions Secretary, would like to see a protocol that would require the BACL Match Secretary to leave a minimum of five weeks where there were no First Division BACL fixtures which involved Bury.

Games involving the four Cambridgeshire clubs do not interfere with SCCA, and BACL could arrange such fixtures in the five free weeks.   This would make it relatively easy for the SCCA Competitions Secretary to do a draw for SCCA Division One using the Hutton system.   The other two divisions in SCCA present little problem as there is much less scope for overlap.   It would also seem sensible that games reserved for the Roger Goldsmith Division 1 should also be allocated to the SCCA counterpart, the League Cup.


If anyone would like to comment on Mike's article, please do so by clicking on 'Post a Comment' below.


Saturday, 2 November 2013

Under 160s

The first matches for the EACU Under 160 Championship take place at the Turner Hall, Newmarket, on Sunday 8 December.   Captain Bob Jones is hoping to be able to field a strong team.   These are the possible players, in grading order:

Michael Clapham (Ipswich)   159
Kevin Greenacre (Ipswich)   157
Andrew Shepherd (Ipswich)   157
Bob Jones (Bury St Edmunds)   157
Pete Smyth (Adastral Park)   156
Leon Burnett (Manningtree)   e154
Phil Hutchings (Manningtree/Clacton)   153
John Feavyour (Bury St Edmunds/Saxmundham)   151
Laurie Pott (Bury St Edmunds)   151
Les Jones (Ipswich)   150
Jim Buis (Manningtree)   150
Simon Riley (Adastral Park)   149
Andrew Donnelly (Bury St Edmunds)   148
Scott Taylor (Bury St Edmunds)   147
Vivien Woodward (Sudbury)   147
Colin Sneddon (Adastral Park)   147
John McAllister (Manningtree)   146
Bob Stephens (Clacton/Manningtree)   146
Harold Thomas (Sudbury)   146
Rob Harden (Unattached)   145
Rob Kelly (Manningtree) 145
Stephen Lewis (Stowmarket)   143
John Lambert (Clacton)   140

Others who have played frequently in recent seasons include:
Ed Kirkham   138
Carl Phillips   137
Colin Roberts   134
Keith Woodcock   134
Jakob Tulic   132
Mark Weidman   130
Mark Bettley   129

If any of the above are reading this, please let know if you are available on 8 December.

Friday, 1 November 2013

A game by Alan Merry

At the recent IM tournament in Majorca, Alan Merry (2297) played 18-year old FM Marc Sanchez (2381) in Round 5.   Here's the game:

White: Alan Merry   Black: Marc Sanchez (Spain)

1.   c4   e5
2.   g3   Nf6
3.   Bg2   c6
4.   d4   exd4
5.   Qxd4   d5
6.   Nf3   dxc4
7.   Qxc4   Nbd7
8.   O-O   Be7
9.   Qc2   O-O
10.   Nc3   Qa5
11.   Bf4   Re8
12.   e4   Nf8
13.   e5   Nh5
14.   Bd2   Ng6
15.   Rfe1   Bd7
16.   Qd1   Nf8
17.   e6!   Nxe6
18.   Re5   Bc5
19.   Ne4   Qb6
20.   Rxh5   f5
21.   Nxc5   Nxc5
22.   Be3   Rxe3
23.   fxe3   Rd8
24.   Rh4   and Black resigned.


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