English Chess Forum

in the UK both the British and Hastings still have a best game prize.

The masterlist was very useful for checking/ including the ages of juniors when doing a grading submission for a junior tournament run by somebody else. In the absence of new masterlists I haven't been running the checker program when submitting online results and the checker program was very useful...

The ECF online ratings seem to be produced in a rather ad hoc manner. Players are identified by ECF membership numbers rather than grading codes, but I was advised that submitting results in the old format was acceptable (#pin1=etc) which does entail using the old (#bcfcode) identification. By the w...

Have the ECF membership rules changed? What you say would not have been the case in the past. Previously, memberships could be purchased from July onwards for the following year, so a non-member (re)joining in July would get membership for 14 months. I think this was a side effect of the way the pr...

I posted on another thread (some time ago) that I visited Bath on one day and my abiding memories are seeing all the other Soviet GMs gathered around Karpov's game and managing to have a conversation with Petrosian (probably translated by the KGB man) about the possibilities of computer chess (he co...

Another consideration is the financial viability. Torquay is a popular venue but these days it costs us money (when I was on the ECF board I recall it cost about £10K). It was always the aim for the British to break even but I think this is more difficult now entry conditions for the main event are ...

During part of the time I was on the SCCU executive I represented the SCCU on the London Chess Association and (as the body never met) this was a particularly easy task. I have a vague recollection of the LCA doing or being responsible for something in the last 10 years or so but the details escape ...

one offer is enough - your opponent knows how you are minded and the pressure is on him to do something and sometimes that turns out to be to your advantage. A general convention would be that if your draw offer is refused, you wait for a counter offer from your opponent. Otherwise you only repeat ...

I think it depends on the context. If you are part of a spectator event and you are being paid for playing (e.g. the London Chess Classic) then have a rule which says no agreed draws before move 30 or whatever. If I'm playing for my club's 6th team in the XYZ league, all the other games are finished...

My 2nd copy of NIC (#1 of 2021) has just dropped through the letter box but still no sign of the "free" book.

Perhaps 'whom' could be antiqued, like some of those chess pieces you can buy from Chess and Bridge?

The worst I have experienced in Guildford is being attacked by an OAP with a walking stick for cycling down a footpath (I did slow down to let him pass). I regard myself as partially vindicated by the fact that the council subsequently converted this path into a shared foot/ cycle path, so I was jus...

I never felt threatened in any way when visiting Brixton in the 1970s. (Well apart from one evening at a rock'n'roll retro night at The Telegraph on Brixton Hill.) The only time I ever suffered any violence in South London was when I tried to stop a man hitting his female partner outside Clapham Com...

A similar query (Merstham or Redhill?) occurred to me when reading the piece about Harry Golembek . His family was described as living in Railton Road, Herne Hill, London. Now, when I lived in Clapham Park nearly 50 years ago we always thought Railton Road was in Brixton. I guessed that the Golembek...

I still haven't received my "free" book 8 weeks after I took up the sub offer. I'm not (particularly) complaining, I guess this is just a sign of the times we live in and I have a few (well, hundreds) of books here that I have barely started ...