English Chess Forum

The Central London League has completed its second season. Congratulations to the winners, Pimlico Rangers (an Athenaeum–Kings Head consortium), and to their captain, Jim Stevenson.

The purpose of this post is to publicise the league and invite team entries for next season.

In the Central London League, all matches are played at a venue within tube zone 1 and all matches finish on the night – no adjudications, no adjournments. Next season the playing session will be a nominal 3 hours and the time control will be all moves in 75 minutes plus 15 seconds a move from the start. Teams are of 5 boards.

The league is informal and non-bureaucratic in spirit. We keep rules and costs to a minimum. We charge £20 per team per match to use the central (Pimlico) venue as their home venue (on Thursday evenings). Also we obviously recover the game fee cost from clubs for their non-ECF members. Apart from that there are no costs.

In 2012/13 we ran one division with seven teams playing home and away (12 fixtures in all). The average grade was 190 on board 1 and 150 on board 5. Overall the average player grade was 170.

Next season we would like to expand the league in two ways:
• more teams in division 1 – ideally enough for each team to play each other once only
• a new division 2 with a grade cap of 160 per player. For next season, division 2 will be open to any player with a grade of 160 or below in any grading list from January 2013 to January 2014 inclusive.

Players who don’t have a team of their own are welcome to join Pimlico and play for one of the Pimlico teams.

The deadline for entries is 30 June. The fixtures for 2013/14 will be published in July, before the London League AGM takes place.

For more details about the league, see the website – http://clcl.org.uk/.

James - You forgot to mention that there was a prize last season of £200 for the winner of the Grand Prix which is detailed on the league website. Hopefully this will continue next season. If so will it cover the new division(s) or will there be a separate prize for each division. And another thing - there is a good selection of beer available at the "Gallery" and "Cask" close to the Pimlico venue, which of course is very near to Pimlico tube station.

Joe Skielnik wrote:...there is a good selection of beer available at the "Gallery" and "Cask" close to the Pimlico venue, which of course is very near to Pimlico tube station.

sadly there is no mention of what the central Pimlico venue is!

St Saviour's Church Hall, Lupus Street, Pimlico

Joe Skielnik wrote:James - You forgot to mention that there was a prize last season of £200 for the winner of the Grand Prix which is detailed on the league website. Hopefully this will continue next season. If so will it cover the new division(s) or will there be a separate prize for each division. And another thing - there is a good selection of beer available at the "Gallery" and "Cask" close to the Pimlico venue, which of course is very near to Pimlico tube station.

There's one prize and it's not division-specific.

Joe Skielnik wrote:St Saviour's Church Hall, Lupus Street, Pimlico

The venue is here. http://pcc1.net/venue.html.

I should have added that we will also run a 3rd division (grade 120 or below) if there is sufficient interest.

I've considered playing in this league, but one of the things stopping me so far is that most of the games are played on a Thursday (which happens to be the home night of a club I play for in another league) - I believe Thursday is the day the central venue is used. Is there any likelihood that the central venue would ever be used on another day of the week, or that unlikely to ever be possible? (To be fair, it is certainly possible to play in this league and others even when another club play on the same day of the week - fixture clashes are not actually that common unless you play for a silly number of chess clubs, though some people have been known to do this...).

Pimlico Chess Club uses the venue on Thursday nights. I could find out whether it was available on other nights, but given the rental charge (£80 a night) it would be uneconomic to open on a second evening on a regular basis unless there was sufficient chess activity from other teams to recover the cost.

I accept that Thursday is a popular night. However, the Central London League had only 12 fixtures last season, leaving the majority of Thursdays free for other commitments.

There's a great deal of league chess activity in London. In effect it's a buyer's market. Someone who is active and who plays for two or more clubs might be in a position to choose fixtures according to personal diary commitments.