English Chess Forum

I would have thought that most leagues will wish to complete their 2019 - 2020 programmes if at all possible. If it becomes feasible to play again in June and July, then postponed games could take place then. I'm genuinely curious - would most people actually want to do this? You always get far few...

Even the pessimistic predictions seem to think this will be under some sort of control by July/August. But I agree the unpredictability and uncertainty hardly help forward planning. Well, if you want pessimistic , look at what Spanish flu did. Still, we're (nearly) definitely going to have a slight...

(for an initial period of 3 weeks) I am told the Warrington League has suspended for 5 weeks; I'm not seeing that in 5 weeks time things are going to be better than now, whereas it is possible that clubs could choose to play matches at the moment It's just about possible?! Full lock down in 1 weeks...

The problem with a vaccine isn't so much going to be producing candidates.

You're going to be giving the thing to hundreds of millions of people. So you have to test it, and that means really testing it, or you could easily enough end up doing more harm than good.

Just listened to a long interview with Patrick Vallance, who comes across as a chap with a good understanding of how epidemics work. Jeremy Hunt, David Robertson and Justin Horton think they know better than him, Tim and I think they don't. Not much more to say. Of course they don't. They've though...

The basic difference with Italy isn't strategy so much, its I think, where we are in the time scale of the infections advance? There's only so long you can keep a population locked down as hard as they're doing in Italy. Also major side effects, including health. So you can see the likely need to do...

David is definitely broadly right here. Ask a public health person for specific advice, tell them about the demographic risk & what we do and.....

Bridge is even worse of course.

At the very least if you get past the flu season people will stop having flu (or similar) and coronavirus at once, which will help. I'm not quite sure what we'll do medium/long term. If it spreads widely through the population and we can't find a vaccine/cure (not obviously promising) then even if i...

One thing to definitely remember - junior events aside - there's a profoundly uncomfortable overlap between the section of the population for which this is a very dangerous virus indeed and the demographics of chess players. Especially for seniors events.

Shopshire I suspect will, goodness knows about the others.

I'm mostly deeply impressed that there weren't more defaults. Hope everyone got back sensibly on Sunday. Wild!

Not SoA-B. And if/when promoted, none of the others would survive promotion anyway. 3N has reached its limits from its own resources. Ambitious incomers can use it as a 'drive-through' on the way up. But otherwise, from the North, we're done I was thinking that a bit today. Some of the squads actua...

It seems a slightly odd combination. Its quite right that you'd need to move a lot of cultural levers round venues, clubs etc to properly change anything but then it expects all the measurable results to occur within 4 years. Rather optimistic time scale to - eg double female participation - that is...

With some reason of course.

He is also really not that young anymore - and has been pro since he was 12(!) - so you can definitely see why he might react this way.

Well it all worked well in the end

Bradford A to go up if they keep that strength of team, you presume, no idea who'll go with them. Shropshire?

J'Adoube appear to be more of an effort to combine teams for numbers than to field strong ones.

I think that’s all the LNER trains - preplanned engineering works. The Leeds train is an hourly, 45 minute service so really is a silly journey and not precisely reliable. Pick ups from Sheffield station or something perhaps, but getting back on Sunday has to be a real worry. The river isn’t due to ...