Every season we enter four teams from South Wales in the National Youth Chess Association competitions. In effect, these are English intercounty championships. As is to be expected, the opposition is strong and successes are few and far between, an occasional place in the top three being the best we can hope for.
On Sunday September 29th however our Under 18 team and Under 14 team both won their respective competitions! It was only the third and fourth occasion on which one of our teams was placed first in over 30 years of trying.
There were only three teams in the U.18 event, but we came ahead of the mighty Sussex team by virtue of taking more points from the team finishing third.
After a nail biting event which was decided by the last game to finish, the U.14 team scored the same number of points as Warwickshire and thus shared the title.
The final results were as follows:
Under18 South Wales 10, Sussex 9, Warwickshire 8.
Under 14 South Wales and Warwickshire 25, Sussex 23, Maidenhead 17.5, Cheshire and North Wales 15, Merseyside 10.5, Wiltshire 10.
The scores of the U.14 players out of three were:
Ethan Chung 3, Harrison Postans 2, Ellison Smith 2, Daniel Chung 2, Bence Szakmany 2.5, Tom Davies 1, Anshul Swamy 2, Ashika Shahameeran 2, Milo Davies 2, Oliver Sapsford 3, Sarthak Nukalapati 2.5, Alex Lawrence 1.
In the U.18 section the Fowler brothers both scored two points out of two.
