English Chess Forum

Peter Ackley - Your post is most bizarre to put it frankly. The incident at Newark was over 2 years ago now, and I got defaulted in the county final for walking into the town centre for 50 minutes (losing time) when I was previously up on the clock to look round a town I had never been to before. T...

Roger de Coverley - Do we know the situation regarding the captains not wanting to change the rule? I suspect that they didn't want it rewritten, and wanted to keep things constant, rather than stop an eighth female player representing a team in div 1 of the 4ncl. As I said before, I cannot think of...

Why is there a big fuss on this issue? The rule is that every team in the top division of the 4NCL needs to have at least one lady player in it. The rule is there to encourage more ladies to play chess. It has worked well over time, and the league has benefitted from it. The thinking may be that if ...

I am, as John Saunders pointed out earlier, Paul's son-in-law, having married his eldest daughter, the beautiful Sarah (commonly called 'Jo') Durrant (now Briscoe) in 2018. Though I first met her in 2011, I had known Paul, himself since 1996, when I played against him for the now defunct club, Hampt...

I think the point Mike Gunn was making was, in his own words, 'It's one of those Laws where the penalty an arbiter applies is discretionary so the default is not automatic'. In other words, different penalties exist, and it is up the the arbiters judgement which is the most appropriate. This, incide...

It is indeed interesting that there is general agreement on this thread against my position. Also, that on a forum where disagreements are commonplace. I contend that a major reason for this is that most disagreements on this ECF Forum could be centred around minutiae which is conducive to many diff...

I think the concept of rules and their application in chess, as in any other sport can be quite a deep subject matter when one gets to the essence of it, but in general many will just go along with the latest diktats, and not give so much thought to them. Because of this, many will only consider the...

I think that if one is *used* to certain conditions, one accepts them and foregoes questioning them. He basically settles for it, sees only the logic in its favour, and so there is nothing more that he will, or can, say on the matter. What I am doing is questioning certain assumptions that many take...

Hello, it is Chris Briscoe here - I almost never go on this site. I was the Surrey player who 'lost' on board 13. There seems to be a mystery surrounding what happened, so I will try and explain this, and why. This was a County Championships final between two counties at opposite ends of the Country...