Glorney Gilbert 2020

Ian Eustis writes:

This year the tournament was meant to be held in France, but Covid 19 soon put paid to that.

Eventually an offer to hold the tournament on line from Alex Holowczak, the Director of Junior Chess for England, was accepted. 

Paradoxically, France then declined to participate. (They had rearranged their junior championships to coincide with the date of the tournament). Belgium accepted an invitation to enter and so we had a five round all play all, as has become normal in recent years. Being on line necessitated slight changes to the rules of the competition, one of which was that all teams were allowed up to two playing reserves.

Being  a total stranger to online chess, as I am, I asked Nicholas Evans to act as team manager for all four of our teams and he did an excellent job, greatly encouraging and enthusing all the players, enabling them to enjoy the tournament.  Continue reading Glorney Gilbert 2020

2020 Online Olympiad News (3/8/20)

 
 
Our FIDE online olympiad team has just found out who we have been paired against in division 3 of this event.  We have been paired with 9 other countries which are shown below in the attached link.  Our matches will start at 12pm utc time on friday august 7th and we will play 3 matches over 6 boards including 2 men, 2 women, 1 junior male and 1 junior female between 12pm and 3pm on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  In order to progress to division 2 of the olympiad we need to finish in the top 3 teams in our group. There will be coverage of the games on the chess.com website.  I would like to wish all the players the best of luck for this event.
 
 
Jason Garcia 
 
Captain
 

ECU E-Magazine July 2020

This can be read here.

2nd WCU Online Blitz Results

The result was:

1st Grzegorz Toczek

2nd Tomasz Miga

3rd Tim Kett

4NCL Online and Junior 4NCL Online Seasons 2 and 3

The 4NCL has anounced the expected schedule for seasons 2 and 3 of both the 4NCL Online and Junior 4NCL Online.

The dates for all fixtures can now be found on the Calendar.

The 4NCL have confirmed that:

“Many thanks to everyone who responded to the 4NCL Online and Junior 4NCL surveys (which you can find on the 4NCL website); we’ve taken account of the feedback in a number of areas:

Entry forms for season 2 will shortly be available on the 4NCL website, together with the rules and fair play guidelines.

  1. The group stage will consist of seven rounds APA (divisions 1-4). Division 5 will be a seven-round Swiss.
  2. Play-offs in Divisions 1-4 will consist of semi-finals and finals (so no quarter-finals).
  3. The penalty for defaults and team list errors is reduced from a game point to half a game point in recognition of the fact that there are only four players per team.
  4. We thought long and hard about the frequency of matches. A majority of people participating in the survey favoured weekly matches, but on reflection we have gone with fortnightly matches for the following reasons:

(a) The appeals process for season 2 under the fair play guidelines is in our view more robust than the earlier guidelines, and we need to allow sufficient time for any appeals both to Lichess and to the appeals committee;

(b) Organising weekly matches for two leagues in season 1 placed a significant admin burden on the 4NCL team which we need to be cognisant of;

(c) We’re very conscious of the risk of fixture congestion as online chess continues to grow in popularity, and would like to play our part in not adding to the problem;

(d) Fortnightly matches give clubs that play on Tuesdays (4NCL Online) or Thursdays (4NCL Junior Online) the chance, should they wish to avail themselves of it, of having a conversation with their OTB league fixture secretaries about avoiding clashes between the 4NCL Online dates and evening league dates as and when OTB resumes.

  1. A player will only be eligible to play for a team in the play-off matches if at least half of the total number of games he/she played in the group stage were played for the team in question.

We’re going for a modest entry fee of £10. We hope that nobody would begrudge the 4NCL team at least some small financial recognition of their efforts, and we would also like to upgrade the number and quality of the trophies we can provide.

Finally, we’re going to run a couple of further events:

  1. A seven-round online autumn congress with one round played each fortnight from 1 September to 24 November inclusive;
  2. A second 4NCL online congress played over the weekend of 21-23 August.

Could I ask you please to bring both events to the attention of your players? Again, information on both events will be on the 4NCL website shortly. Many thanks!”

Kind regards

Mike Turan

PS Alex H has written an interesting article about fair play issues in online chess which again you can find on the 4NCL website.

 

 

Welsh team selection for 2020 Online Olympiad

The full Welsh team has now been anounced for the upcoming 2020 Online Olympiad which starts on July 22nd. These are as follows:

Category ‘Main’ Players Reserves
Open Boards 1. Greg Toczek 3. Jason Garcia
2. Tim Kett 4. William Hewitt
Women’s Boards 1. Olivia Smith 3. Julie Wilson
2. Kimberley Chong 4. Vacant
Open Under 20 1. Ifan Rathbone-Jones 2. Hugo Fowler
Girl Under 20 1. Venetia Sivarjasingam 2. Shayanna Sivarjasingam
Team Captain Jason Garcia  

2nd WCU Online Blitz (22/7/20)

The 2nd WCU Online Blitz will be held on 22nd July 2020 starting at 19.00pm.

Further details can be found here.

1st WCU Online Blitz Results

The results are shown below.

1st – Hugo Fowler

2nd – Tom Brown

3rd – Joe Fathallah

2020 WCU AGM

The 2020 WCU AGM will be held online on 6th September at 14.30pm.

All proposals should be forwarded to the Executive Director by 9th August.

International Chess Day July 20th 2020

The WCU has received the following message from FIDE.

“Dear chess friend,

Very soon, on July 20th, we will celebrate International Chess Day. As you probably know, this also marks FIDE’s 96th anniversary.

This is a day to celebrate chess, and from the International Chess Federation, we would like to reinforce this tradition.

Last year many of you joined us in this celebration, and thanks to that we achieved resounding success: many people and institutions from “outside” the chess world echoed our campaign, and we managed to attract more people to our sport.

This year we will also count on the invaluable support of the United Nations and UNESCO.

We would like to invite you to take part in this celebration again. Our plan for the International Chess Day 2020 is simple but ambitious: we want to make an appeal to the members of our chess community and ask you to teach someone how to play chess to mark this day.

You will find detailed instructions below. I would kindly ask you to distribute this information among your friends, members of your chess club or federation, associates and sponsors, and representatives of the media in your respective countries.

Arkady Dvorkovich
FIDE President” Continue reading International Chess Day July 20th 2020