Shropshire Chess Congress 5-6 January 2013

[Steve Rooney]

Many thanks to everyone who took part in a very successful congress. We had 140 entrants with 136 starters, and the strongest Open in the county that anyone can remember.

The Shropshire Open went to form with GM Stephen Gordon taking 1st prize, although he had to work hard throughout the weekend including taking on two fellow 3Cs members. The final round saw him paired against IM John Cox, a regular at the Shropshire event, who came joint second with Iolo Jones. Gavyn Cooper won the inaugural Top Shropshire player in the Open award with an unbeaten 3.5 and tournament performance of 205.

Congratulations to all the prize winners. (On the playing front it was a better weekend for sons and heirs than organisers )

Full results link on the website - http://www.shropshirechess.org

See you next year.

OPEN

1st Stephen Gordon GM 4.5

2nd John Cox IM 4

Iolo Jones 4

Grading U185 Nick Walker 3.5

Grading U170 John Footner 3 

Top Shropshire player in Open Gavyn Cooper 3.5

MAJOR

1st= Nigel Holroyd 4

Ashwin Kalyana 4

Toby Neal 4


Grading U150 Graham Shepherd 3.5

Grading U135 Ivor Salter 3.5

MINOR

1st= Matthew Best 4.5

George Viszokai 4.5

3rd= Roger Brown 4

 Jonathan Newey 4

Chris Paul 4

Francis Rooney 4

 Adrian Zdanowski 4


Grading U115 Jonathan Newey 4

Francis Rooney 4

Grading U100 John Davies 3.5

Junior prize Jonathan Newey 4

Francis Rooney 4

[David Pardoe]

Well done Steve and your team with this congress...great to see it getting such good support.
I guess the efforts of organising and playing probably got to you a bit..its a hefty workload at the best of times.

On another tac...I noticed one sad piece of news on the Shropshire website, with the passing of Iain Wilson in October. He was a great contributer to the chess scene in Shropshire, and always had a cheerful smile & friendly welcome for fellow players. He also was an active contributer on the county circuit & the MCCU. He will be greatly missed...

[Steve Rooney]

Thanks David.

Indeed Iain was a great stalwart and served in many roles including chairman of the association and organiser of the former Wrekin congress. He was a man of great charm and wit, and is very fondly remembered amongst his chess colleagues in Shropshire.

[Alex Holowczak]

This was the first time I'd ever played in this congress, or the Wrekin Congress that preceded it, because I was always of an age where I'd have exams in the next week or two after the event, and so I had other things to worry about...

I was very impressed with the venue; the playing area was excellent (carpeted, spacious, and well lit), and three-course Sunday lunches were available between rounds on the Sunday for less than £8. Other lunchtime refreshments were available, as well as free water machines during play.

The location is hundreds of yards from the centre of Telford, so there are good places to eat in the evening, and being in January, there were a million hotel rooms in the area that were available.

The organisers were particularly helpful to those of us whose attempts to print entry forms for their own events earlier in the weekend were unsuccessful.

I can recommend this event to anyone who considers playing in it in future.

[Bruce Holland]

I would like to echo Alex's comments about the quality of this venue. Playing conditions have come a long way forward over the past 40 years. Buildings such as the Wrekin Housing Trust's training centre are a good source for types of venues as an alternative to hotels (such as those used by the 4NCL and e2e4 events), as they are well equipped with suitable tables & seating, and the lighting is excellent. The catering arrangements were of a high quality, and amazingly cheap. Well done to Francis and Steve for organising and putting on this show. Also an honourable mentioning in the despatches should be given to Dave Thomas, who as Chief Arbiter, did the Arbiting on his own for the whole event.

The Shropshire CA are well blessed in their arrangement with the Wrekin Housing Trust.

I could well be wrong on this one, but I believe the Shropshire Chess Congress was the first weekend congress to go effectively paperless in their 2012 event. No pairing cards, no pairing boards, and no wall charts. The only dependence upon paper were the results slips. Since last weekend I've been thinking about that one, and I now have sketched out in my head a design for how that might be done.

We shall be following in Shropshire's footsteps at the Warwickshire Open Chess Championships, scheduled for 2nd & 3rd March 2013. The venue is at the Trident Centre (part of the Leamington Further Education College) and it too is a very high quality venue, with excellent canteen facilities well away from the playing areas. There will also be plenty of space for analysis rooms and parents to sit it out whilst their children are playing chess. There are also overhead projector facilities built in to many of the rooms, so yes we will be going paperless (save for results slips) as well, like we did at the Leamington RapidPlay in early September.

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2nd & 3rd March 2013: Warwickshire Open Chess Championships

[Roger de Coverly]

I could well be wrong on this one, but I believe the Shropshire Chess Congress was the first weekend congress to go effectively paperless in their 2012 event. No pairing cards, no pairing boards, and no wall charts. The only dependence upon paper were the results slips.

e2e4 have been run almost like this from when they first started. There's a paper display in that the pairings and standings are prints of the web pages generated by the pairing program. For a weekend Congress it's desirable anyway to have the pairings on a web page, so that those remote to the venue can find out their next round opponents. With smart phones, this is often how players establish their opponents for the next round, especially for the next morning. A printed list at the venue will remind players of the board number that they are playing on.

So I would regard overhead projectors as a luxury rather than a necessity, although for a blitz or rapid-play, they reduce the time between rounds by eliminating the printing of paper.

One weakness of printed charts and pairings remains from the earliest days of computerised pairings, twenty years ago, namely that the font is always too small to be read from a distance. Pairing cards with the names written with marker pens have a distinct advantage on that score.

[Clive Blackburn]

So I would regard overhead projectors as a luxury rather than a necessity, although for a blitz or rapid-play, they reduce the time between rounds by eliminating the printing of paper.

One weakness of printed charts and pairings remains from the earliest days of computerised pairings, twenty years ago, namely that the font is always too small to be read from a distance. Pairing cards with the names written with marker pens have a distinct advantage on that score.

Overhead projectors might sound like a bit of a luxury but they do avoid that last minute scramble as everyone crowds around the pairing board (or computer monitor) as soon as it goes up, often with only a few minutes to go to the start of the next round. The projector displays can be read from quite a distance away.

The other advantage is that the draw is on view throughout the round and can be seen from almost anywhere in the hall, so if you want to know who is playing on a particular board, all you have to do is glance up at it.

[LawrenceCooper]

So I would regard overhead projectors as a luxury rather than a necessity, although for a blitz or rapid-play, they reduce the time between rounds by eliminating the printing of paper.

One weakness of printed charts and pairings remains from the earliest days of computerised pairings, twenty years ago, namely that the font is always too small to be read from a distance. Pairing cards with the names written with marker pens have a distinct advantage on that score.

Overhead projectors might sound like a bit of a luxury but they do avoid that last minute scramble as everyone crowds around the pairing board (or computer monitor) as soon as it goes up, often with only a few minutes to go to the start of the next round. The projector displays can be read from quite a distance away.

The other advantage is that the draw is on view throughout the round and can be seen from almost anywhere in the hall, so if you want to know who is playing on a particular board, all you have to do is glance up at it.

The OHPs are definitely very useful at large blitz tournaments like the British Blitz at Brunel or the European Blitz with hundreds of players and the potential for a massive rugby scrum around the pairings if printed on a sheet of A4 paper.

[Alex Holowczak]

The OHPs are definitely very useful at large blitz tournaments like the British Blitz at Brunel or the European Blitz with hundreds of players and the potential for a massive rugby scrum around the pairings if printed on a sheet of A4 paper.

This is a problem I have at Quinborne. One thing I have done to remedy it is to remove some extraneous information from the template, and make the printing landscape, rather than portrait.

The other thing I've done for the Rapidplay is colour-code each section (by printing the pairings on different coloured paper), and put pairings for each section up in different areas of the venue. People can see the colour from a long distance away, so the scrum is reduced because people go to the right area of the building to find their section. Can't do this for the Blitz, because there's only one section!

[I'm going to colour-code the result slips next time, too. It will make it easier for me to put the results in the computer - until someone puts the wrong slips out on the tables... I might even give the section names as colours on the entry form, rather than Open/Major/Inter/Minor.]

[Neill Cooper]

I use digital projector to show pairings at the school events I run. With over 100 players in 27 teams the photo shows how easily players could see their team's board number and so find where to sit. With 4 rounds in 2 hours speed was essential! In the last round I could also show running totals so players did not need to keep on asking what the latest scores were.
[Thanks to John Higgs for the photos, more can be seen at http://englishchess.org.uk/Juniors/teams/schools/]

[Steve Rooney]

We are indeed very fortunate with the Shropshire congress to have such a well-equipped venue. There are three OHPs, each with a laptop, in the main playing room which probably is a luxury, but this allowed us to put each section draw on a different screen and, as mentioned above, lessened the scrum at the start of each round. We used wi-fi to connect the web-published versions from TD on each screen. Last year we didn't have this and had to rush round to each of the laptops with a USB stick which was not ideal.

Results slips are still a bit of a bugbear and I will be interested to hear suggestions on improving that. One result was missing from round 4 on Sunday and we only found it out the day after the event when one of the players saw 0-0 on the published results.

Running an (almost) paperless event certainly reduces the arbiting and controlling workload and also seems to improve the experience for participants. We're still learning though and are hoping to have an even bigger and better congress next year, as well as running other high profile events at the same venue. We hope to receive further suggestions for improvements when we send out our feedback forms.

[Roger de Coverly]

Results slips are still a bit of a bugbear and I will be interested to hear suggestions on improving that.

For standard play events, you could consider adopting the practice used in internationally rated events of using duplicate score-sheets. So you ask the players to sign the top copy and hand it in both copies with the result indicated. As an added advantage, you can publish the games played in the tournament provided you can find a volunteer to do the input.

[Steve Rooney]

Thanks Roger. Yes asking for signed scoresheets would probably mean we had fewer missing results slips, but we have baulked at the idea of inputting all the games manually.

We did manage to retrieve the game score from board one in the Open as we had a sensory board there - linked to a monitor in the cafeteria, although that element didn't work seamlessly.

At some point I am hoping that technology will deal with this. I know we have had discussions previously about app-driven game score devices and the issues of cheating, but at some point I would like to believe that we have access to much better means of capturing game scores, for the benefit of both organisers and players.

A sensory board is the obvious way of avoiding the cheating problems, and although we are considering buying some for use in next year's Open and other events, the current cost is prohibitive when it comes to widespread use. Are there alternatives to the well-known brand of board? If not, there ought to be.

[Roger de Coverly]

Thanks Roger. Yes asking for signed scoresheets would probably mean we had fewer missing results slips, but we have baulked at the idea of inputting all the games manually.

Collecting the score-sheets doesn't mean that you have to input the game. It's good for the publicity of the event if games from the Open show up in databases worldwide, but that doesn't commit you to inputting the Minor if you don't have a volunteer. You just treat the score-sheet as a substitute for a results slip, with the advantage that you get two of them.

[Steve Rooney]

Thanks Roger. Yes asking for signed scoresheets would probably mean we had fewer missing results slips, but we have baulked at the idea of inputting all the games manually.

Collecting the score-sheets doesn't mean that you have to input the game. It's good for the publicity of the event if games from the Open show up in databases worldwide, but that doesn't commit you to inputting the Minor if you don't have a volunteer. You just treat the score-sheet as a substitute for a results slip, with the advantage that you get two of them.

That's true, but if someone collected my score sheet, I think I would have an expectation that they were going to do something with it. We might of course find volunteers, so it is something we may consider.

Long term, I think we should get rid of pens and pencils. The DGT boards appear to be priced to target major competitions; there is clear potential for a company to target the mass market for chess with a reliable device that records the moves and outputs a pgn file, at a price that clubs might aspire to.