2016 BUCA Championships: 20-21 February

[Alex Holowczak]

The 2016 BUCA Championships will be held at the Holiday Inn Birmingham Airport on the weekend of 20th/21st February.

There are 48 teams from 23 Universities split across the Championship (14), Plate (16) and Shield (18) divisions.

The Championship will see defending champions Cambridge take on various other teams including 2013 and 2014 champions Imperial, and 2012 champions Edinburgh. 2010 champions Bath have been absent for a few years, but return this year.

The favourites for the Championship will be Cambridge, who have IM Yang-Fan Zhou (ENG) leading their challenge. Imperial have three FIDE Masters, Ryan-Rhys Griffiths (IRL), Nikolas Nuesken (GER) and Jacques Netzer (FRA). Other titled players include FM Sam Chow (AUS) playing for Bristol, FM Peter Batchelor (ENG) playing for Warwick, and WFM Andrea Vince (SRB) playing for Exeter.

Across the three tournaments, there are new Universities joining from Goldsmiths (London), Lancaster and Sunderland.

All games from the Championship will be broadcast on liveboards. Additionally, there will be commentary from Phil Makepeace and Chris Russell, both of whom played in the revival event in 2010 for UCL and Warwick respectively. The intention is that this will be broadcast on Twitch and also Chess24, with the videos uploaded to YouTube afterwards.

We are looking forward to an exciting weekend!

[David Sedgwick]

Welcome back, Alex. It's ten months since your last post.

Congratulations on getting such a large entry and best wishes for a successful event.

[Brian Towers]

The favourites for the Championship will be Cambridge, who have IM Yang-Fan Zhou (ENG) leading their challenge. Imperial have three FIDE Masters, Ryan-Rhys Griffiths (IRL), Nikolas Nuesken (GER) and Jacques Netzer (FRA). Other titled players include FM Sam Chow (AUS) playing for Bristol, FM Peter Batchelor (ENG) playing for Warwick, and WFM Andrea Vince (SRB) playing for Exeter.

And, at the other end of the field, Sunderland University, captained by Dominik Schwarz (GER and South Shields) with Piotr Niedbal (POL) on board 1, provided Dominik managed to track him down after I tipped him off that they have another player who knows how to press the button on a chess clock

[MartinCarpenter]

Great to see this doing so well