English Chess Forum

Idle Chess Club in Bradford yesterday hosted an excellent simultaneous event with GM Keith Arkell.

Keith played 20 players from a number of clubs in the Bradford & District Chess Association (BDCA) over a period of approx 3.5hours.

The event was thoroughly enjoyable, played in good humour by all and was a great opportunity for local league players (many of whom only play in the BDCA league) to play a Grand Master.

Keith himself said that he was suprised by the quality of opposition which on paper ranged from 184(YCA) to 44(YCA). Keith said that it was "probably one of the toughest simul's he has ever done". This was reflected in the score of BDCA players 5.5 - Arkell 14.5. In total there were 5 wins and one draw for the BDCA players.

The wins were taken by Matthew Webb (Idle Chess Club), Ihor Lewyk (Bradford Chess Club), Winston Williams (Bingley Chess Club), Mike Bramson (Undercliffe Chess Club) and Kevin Winter (Bingley Chess Club). The draw was claimed by myself after an interesting sicilian game which resulted in a night v bishop ending and ultimately three pawns each. Keith had the black squared bishop and all my pieces were on white squares, there was no way through for his king and thus a draw was agreed.

My thanks on behalf of the BDCA to Keith for playing in this event.

I would thoroughly recommend Keith to anyone else looking for a strong GM to conduct a simul event. He has been very reasonable, flexible and professional throughout the organising and running of this event. He was even generous enough to not only offer us choice of colour but also the option of playing against either 1.e4 or 1.d4 if we chose the black bits!

All the best Keith. I hope your not feeling too bad today after that curry we had!

Cheers Andrew. Thanks for a tough but friendly ''match''.

My body is well versed in dealing with curries by now,and the Bradford varieties are pretty good

I was already aware of Ihor's strength,having had a very tough game against him at Paignton a few years back,but there really are a lot of tough underrated players concealed in the vast population of Bradford.

I just took this from Wikipedia:

Bradford has a population of 497,400,[4] making it the fourth-most populous metropolitan borough and the sixth-most populous local authority district in the UK. Bradford forms part of the West Yorkshire Urban Area conurbation which in 2001 had a population of 1.5 million[5] and the city is part of the Leeds-Bradford Larger Urban Zone (LUZ), the third largest in the UK after London and Manchester, with an estimated population in the 2004 Urban Audit of 2.4 million.[6] The urban core has a population of 293,717.