London Central YMCA (Centymca) Games on Britbase

[John Saunders]

I have collected game scores from the mid-1970s London Central YMCA bulletin The Centymca Story, by Jimmy Adams, and put them in a file on Britbase...

http://www.saund.co.uk/britbase/pgn/cen ... iewer.html

The bulletin consisted of games played by various members of the club, mainly between 1973 and 1976 (when the bulletin was published), and many of them were against distinguished players, including GMs Bronstein, Korchnoi, Taimanov, etc. Very few of these games will be found on existing databases. I have added a few relevant games sourced from elsewhere. I imagine copies of the bulletin will be hard to come by (I borrowed a copy owned by Richard James and am grateful to him for the loan) but is well worth seeking out as it was excellently assembled by a team of Centymca players, headed by Jimmy Adams and Mike Wills. Though cheaply produced, the content was very rich: photos, results, articles and stats as well as some fine annotations by Jimmy. It marks a particularly vibrant time in the development of chess in England, with star name players coming to the UK for the (then) well-sponsored Hastings Congress, and subsequently invited to give simuls and play rapidplay events in London afterwards.

The Britbase file contains all the games from the bulletin, plus a few more which I thought relevant to include, unannotated apart from the occasional factual item. As well as one-off games from miscellaneous events, the database includes...

a) 28 games played in a ten-player, 15-minute rapidplay event held at the Centymca club on 22 January 1976. Results: 1-2 David Bronstein, Mark Taimanov 8/9, 3-4 David Goodman, Jimmy Adams 6, 5 Gerald Bennett 5, 6 Andrew Martin 4, 7 Mike Brown 3, 8-9 Nicholas Benjamin, Julian Hodgson 2½, 10 Simon Brown 0. It is quite remarkable that so many games played at such a fast limit should have been preserved for posterity, and for this we have to thank a team of enthusiasts at the club who were deputed to scribble the games down, including Ray Cannon, Stuart Fancy, Richard Lobo, Sandys Dickinson, Howard Tebbs, George Hodgson and David Brown. Sponsorship was by the London Chess Club, London Chess Congress and the Slater Foundation.

b) 22 games of a simul given by Viktor Korchnoi on 18 January 1976 against Centymca. Overall result: Korchnoi +26, =4, -0.

c) 18 games of a simul given by Rafael Vaganian in January 1975 at Centymca. Some of the games here are from BCM rather than the Adams bulletin. (I don't have the date or result of this simul - any ideas?)

d) Several other simul games in displays given by Korchnoi, Bronstein and Jansa on 17 January 1976, including the game won by the 10-year-old Nigel Short against Korchnoi. Again, I have supplemented the games with those found in BCM and elsewhere.

[Simon Brown]

Thanks John. I was hoping that my 0% result would remain accessible only to the select few who still have a copy of The Centymca Story....

The YMCA simuls were nearly always on Sundays, and normally the first Sunday after the end of Hastings. The Vaganian simul was a week after the LJCC simul, if you know that date (I played him in both). I don't recall the exact result but I am pretty sure he lost 10 and drew a few at Centymca, which was odd because a week earlier he scored heavily and quickly against the juniors, finishing his simul in three hours when Beliavsky struggled and made a worse score much more slowly. I am sure Leonard will have more details.

Some nice memories here, 0% notwithstanding

[Roger de Coverly]

I have collected game scores from the mid-1970s London Central YMCA bulletin The Centymca Story, by Jimmy Adams, and put them in a file on Britbase...

That solves something that I couldn't recall. There's a line in the Taimanov Modern Benoni that goes

1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 c5 3. d5 e6 4. Nc3 exd5 5. cxd5 d6 6. e4 g6 7. f4 Bg7 8. Bb5+ Nbd7 9. e5 dxe5 10. fxe5 Nh5 11. e6 fxe6 12. dxe6 and now Black goes 0-0 leaving the Knight to its fate. This was played by Pigott in the British Lightning in 1974 against someone famous and was published in BH Wood's Chess at the time. If you look at modern databases, the line doesn't really feature until Norwood and others in the mid 1980s. It was however known in English club and county circles in the 1970s, for example I had faced it as White in the 1975 Southend SCCU Championship. It's probably best not to take the Knight and continue to develop instead.

But who was the victim who took the Knight? For a while my memory was saying Franklin, but the opening doesn't fit. I gather then it was Haygarth.


1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 c5 3. d5 e6 4. Nc3 exd5 5. cxd5 d6 6. e4 g6 7. f4 Bg7 8. Bb5+ Nbd7 9. e5 dxe5 10. fxe5 Nh5 11. e6 fxe6 12. dxe6 0-0