English Chess Forum

The latest statement on the ECF library would appear to be the following item from the board's strategy statement presented to the AGM in October this year: "Work with De Montfort University Leicester to manage the transfer of the library from the Office to the DMU Special Collections facility."

This is sad news. I will miss him.

Another Hastings moment: I hitchhiked to Hastings in the late 60s and witnessed a postmortem between Gligoric and Portisch, players who I had previously only read about in the pages of the BCM or newspaper columns. Despite being the first GMs I had seen in the flesh they seemed quite pleasant and or...

Captain of Chess and Table Tennis (not a combined sport).

I never understood the argument for recalibration. It was Sean Hewitt's doing and he wrote a paper explaining why it was done and I suppose I should go back and read it, but my problem is this: the idea behind the grading system is that if 2 players with grades 25 apart play a match then one of them...

Why not ask leagues and congresses, through their results officers, to provide estimates which could then be used as seed values ... Isn't this what used to happen before the central computer program took over the job of working out what a new player's grade should be? (Except there was then no ite...

OK - seen this. Assuming we have a quorum we will be starting at 1.30pm.

In recent years Council has amended the Board's financial proposals and rejected proposed changes to the County Championships so (while these decisions were reactive) Council does have some influence.

Back in the day when you didn't need to join the ECF to play FIDE rated chess there were about 1,000 "Direct Members" of the ECF (the equivalent of today's Platinum membership). Although you got some benefits from this membership (free yearbook, reduced entry fee to tournaments and a free annual pri...

There is a junior event taking place at Basildon at the same time as this rapidplay so cross-subsidy would be possible. The first tournament I ever played in was a rapidplay for juniors in Basildon in the late 60's. I scored 50% and particularly remember the first game where my opponent blitzed me o...

I don't think this model (choice of £6 or £19 entry) will work. (The organiser will lose money.) Following some opinions expressed on here that participation in tournaments was not sensitive to the prize money offered we tried lowering the prizes in the Surrey Congress and we didn't have a viable to...

If your grade was based on current speed then it would be based on just the last game played. Your grade would be even more volatile than when the ECF adopted the last 30 games played method.

Probably not (see 6.12.2. I think you have to rely on your scoresheet.

"6.12.1 Screens, monitors, or demonstration boards showing the current position on the chessboard, the moves and the number of moves made/completed, and clocks which also show the number of moves, are allowed in the playing hall. 6.12.2 The player may not make a claim relying only on information sho...

A few years back (when the 2 week congress was standard) the ECF ran graded sections for seniors (U130 and U150 I think). There were enough entrants to make the competitions viable but after I became the (joint) British U130 Senior Champion in Aberystwyth in 2014 the events were abandoned. Perhaps I...