Cunard Hotel, Hammersmith Chess Tournament

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Paul Dupré
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Cunard Hotel, Hammersmith Chess Tournament

Post by Paul Dupré » Sun Oct 17, 2021 4:10 pm

Hi Guys,

Does anyone have any memorabilia from the above tournament held in the mid 1970s.

All I remember is being very young, I think about age 13/14, but went there by myself from my home in Weybridge, Surrey.

Paul
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Roger de Coverly
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Re: Cunard Hotel, Hammersmith Chess Tournament

Post by Roger de Coverly » Sun Oct 17, 2021 4:19 pm

Paul Dupré wrote:
Sun Oct 17, 2021 4:10 pm
Does anyone have any memorabilia from the above tournament held in the mid 1970s.
I've got twelve games from it in 1978. I played the under 190 (if that was the limit) the first weekend and the Open the second. The 1977 tournament had been in a hotel near Picadilly Circus. I don't recall if there was a 1979 or later edition. Sponsors were the National Bank of Dubai and the Evening Standard as far as I recall. It was a monster playing hall. The hotel itself was parallel to the Hammersmith flyover and the playing area was almost the length of the flyover. As befits the name, the styling of the hotel had similarities to an ocean liner. I'm trying to remember if it's still there.

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John Upham
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Re: Cunard Hotel, Hammersmith Chess Tournament

Post by John Upham » Sun Oct 17, 2021 4:25 pm

I'm pretty sure I played in that event. I'll see what I can dig out.
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Paul Dupré
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Re: Cunard Hotel, Hammersmith Chess Tournament

Post by Paul Dupré » Sun Oct 17, 2021 4:26 pm

Hi Roger, was it Tottenham Court Road, if so I played that one as well.
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Re: Cunard Hotel, Hammersmith Chess Tournament

Post by Ian Thompson » Sun Oct 17, 2021 4:27 pm

Roger de Coverly wrote:
Sun Oct 17, 2021 4:19 pm
I'm trying to remember if it's still there.
Now the Novotel London West?

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John Saunders
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Re: Cunard Hotel, Hammersmith Chess Tournament

Post by John Saunders » Sun Oct 17, 2021 6:23 pm

Paul,

I've attached most of the programme / entry form for the July 1978 Evening Standard tournament as a PDF. It's short of the actual entry form pages as I would have filled them in and sent them off with a cheque. But most of the details of the tournaments can be found there and more besides.
Hope this helps.
197807eveningstandardentryform.pdf
(321.02 KiB) Downloaded 106 times
Personally, this tournament was not my finest hour. I played in the open and lost a game to a Yugoslav player rated 2360 in round 1 and lost again to a lower rated Frenchman in round 2. In round 3 I found myself on board 120. I think that might have been the bottom board - if so, it tells us that there were 240 players in the Open. If not, there must have been even more. My third round opponent barely knew how to castle. What's that? You're asking if I won that game? How very dare you!
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John Upham
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Re: Cunard Hotel, Hammersmith Chess Tournament

Post by John Upham » Sun Oct 17, 2021 6:53 pm

John Saunders wrote:
Sun Oct 17, 2021 6:23 pm
My third round opponent barely knew how to castle.
Had he or she been trained by Mir Sultan Khan?
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Kevin Thurlow
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Re: Cunard Hotel, Hammersmith Chess Tournament

Post by Kevin Thurlow » Sun Oct 17, 2021 10:30 pm

I played in both weekends, the "Amateur" U190, getting 3/6, which was OK grading-wise, then rather better in the "Open" the following week. I deeply regret I have been robbed of 40+ years of gloating at John, but maybe not... I was then graded 178 and had a nice win over MV Taylor (166) in round 1. I assume accelerated pairings were used. Saturday was quite interesting as all three games went to the quickplay finish (from memory, was it 40 in 2 hours?)
Rd 2 - Mike Surtees (195) 0-1 KJT
Rd 3 - KJT 0-1 Simon Webb (IM) 230
Rd 4 - William Watson (198) draw KJT

By time control in the last game, the room was starting to spin, luckily, I had just turned a dubious position into a slightly better one, so after we reset the clocks he offered a draw, and I figuratively bit his hand off. Having played over 12 hours chess in about 14 hours, I then had an hour's drive home...
Next morning I lost to PJ Acton (184), effectively in 10 moves, then had a really dull draw (TA Richards) in round 6 to get 3/6 again. John will now tell us that having been 2 points behind after two games, that he fnished higher than me. It was a nice event though.

It put me off 3 games in a day a bit!

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Re: Cunard Hotel, Hammersmith Chess Tournament

Post by Roger de Coverly » Sun Oct 17, 2021 11:30 pm

Kevin Thurlow wrote:
Sun Oct 17, 2021 10:30 pm
I was then graded 178 and had a nice win over MV Taylor (166) in round 1. I assume accelerated pairings were used. Saturday was quite interesting as all three games went to the quickplay finish (from memory, was it 40 in 2 hours?)
According to John's entry form ,it was 40 in 100 minutes plus 20 in rounds 1 to 4 and then 40 in 120 plus 20 in rounds 5 and 6.

It was almost certainly one of Stewart's pairing schemes. In the first weekend I reached 4/5, but lost in the last round. In the second weekend I played and beat a famous name, Dilworth, in the first round and drew with John Pigott in the second. The third I lost to PJ Acton and drew the fourth. I gave away a point and a half on the final day. In round 5 I sacrificed for a repetition but unwisely played on. In the final round I put a rook en prise having just tricked my way into a winning position, deep into the post move 40 session.

Signs of the times on the entry form - London hotel rooms at £ 5 a night and veteran prizes at 40. A large number of the competitors would have been under 30 and many of those over 18.

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John Saunders
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Re: Cunard Hotel, Hammersmith Chess Tournament

Post by John Saunders » Mon Oct 18, 2021 12:23 am

Kevin Thurlow wrote:
Sun Oct 17, 2021 10:30 pm
Having played over 12 hours chess in about 14 hours, I then had an hour's drive home...
Next morning I lost to PJ Acton (184), effectively in 10 moves, then had a really dull draw (TA Richards) in round 6 to get 3/6 again. John will now tell us that having been 2 points behind after two games, that he finished higher than me.
He will. Having perpetrated a Double Swiss Gambit, I recovered to 3½/6. Having disposed of the near beginner in round 3, I was paired against a 162-graded junior in round 4 who promptly blundered a piece in 7 moves. Still gave me a heck of a fight before I won. (He went on to become a GM - James Howell.) Another 160-ish junior held me to a draw in round 5. I was paired with yet another player graded in the 160s in round 6 and won. So a mediocre grading performance of around 180 x 6, whereas Kevin's result, with half a point fewer, was probably graded closer to 190 - a good example of how middling scores in Swiss tournaments are not significant. I don't feel entitled to gloating rights.

The memory of this tournament that has stayed with me was before the start on the Friday, walking down a long corridor and then entering a vast hall the size of an aircraft hangar to see more chess sets in one room than I had ever seen before. It was awe-inspiring. For me, that was the pinnacle of the Fischer boom / English explosion years. Whenever I've been to a weekender subsequently, and seen a fraction of those boards in a playing hall, my mind has turned back to that staggering sight in 1978 and made a comparison. BCM quoted a figure of 1,242 competitors - I guess that was for the entire congress over the two weekends so that suggests there might have been 600+ people playing in that room at the same time.

The entry form refers to the playing hall as the Queen Mary Suite of the Cunard International Hotel and says that it was air-conditioned. In my scorebook I wrote that the tournament was played in "very sticky, humid conditions" so maybe the aircon wasn't working. (Alternatively, I could have been making excuses for not playing very well.) This could be what is now known as the Champagne Suite of the Novotel London West Hotel which is documented and advertised here. The suite measures 1,726 square metres.
Last edited by John Saunders on Mon Oct 18, 2021 12:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Cunard Hotel, Hammersmith Chess Tournament

Post by Richard Thursby » Mon Oct 18, 2021 12:28 am

Ian Thompson wrote:
Sun Oct 17, 2021 4:27 pm
Roger de Coverly wrote:
Sun Oct 17, 2021 4:19 pm
I'm trying to remember if it's still there.
Now the Novotel London West?
Indeed. A place with which many people have become more acquainted than they would have liked over the course of this year (the conference centre was a major vaccination centre).
Roger de Coverly wrote:
Sun Oct 17, 2021 11:30 pm
veteran prizes at 40.
That makes me feel geriatric!

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Re: Cunard Hotel, Hammersmith Chess Tournament

Post by Roger de Coverly » Mon Oct 18, 2021 1:10 am

John Saunders wrote:
Mon Oct 18, 2021 12:23 am

The memory of this tournament that has stayed with me was before the start on the Friday, walking down a long corridor and then entering a vast hall the size of an aircraft hangar to see more chess sets in one room than I had ever seen before.
I certainly remember the length of the playing hall.

Two similar memories. One from 1968 when county matches were for one or two seasons played at the Royal Festival Hall, sets as far as you could see in what seemed a vast arena. The other is Islington 1972. I had played in 1970 and 1971 which were big. In 1972 if you were in the Open, it was a tournament in a large school hall perhaps different only in size from my very first tournament in 1967 in the hall where I took O and A levels. The difference was that if you wandered around to see who was playing in the lower sections, everywhere you went was seemingly yet another room with sets and clocks.

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Re: Cunard Hotel, Hammersmith Chess Tournament

Post by John Saunders » Mon Oct 18, 2021 9:45 am

Roger de Coverly wrote:
Mon Oct 18, 2021 1:10 am

Two similar memories. One from 1968 when county matches were for one or two seasons played at the Royal Festival Hall, sets as far as you could see in what seemed a vast arena.
The Royal Festival Hall, where I made my county match debut in 1968, was the other picture in my head when I was trying to determine the venue with the most chess sets that I had seen up to that time. For the benefit of those too young to remember its use as a chess venue, the chess was played, not in the concert hall itself, but in the public concourses on one (or more) of the upper floors. By judicious searching through old SCCU bulletins we might even be able to discover how many county matches were played there concurrently and over how many boards. Bucks and other outlying counties played over 50 boards but metropolitan counties played over 70-100 boards, so five or six concurrent matches might well consist of as many as 300 boards or even more.

I still enjoy teasing people by telling them "I've played at the Festival Hall, you know."
Roger de Coverly wrote:
Mon Oct 18, 2021 1:10 am

... my very first tournament in 1967 in the hall where I took O and A levels.
The same hall where I made my own tournament debut in 1968.

Enough nostalgia for now as there is a danger of this Two Buckinghamshiremen dialogue morphing into Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch.
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Re: Cunard Hotel, Hammersmith Chess Tournament

Post by John Saunders » Thu Oct 21, 2021 2:35 pm

Whilst looking for something else, I stumbled upon Bernard Cafferty's report on the 1978 Evening Standard/National Bank of Dubai Open in the September 1978 issue of CHESS (page 385). It clarifies a couple of points discussed upthread...
Bernard Cafferty in CHESS wrote:The Evening Standard/National Bank of Dubai event organised by the London Chess Association was held in the huge conference centre (the Queen Mary suite) of the Cunard International Hotel, Hammersmith.

Some 495 boards were set up for play in the different sections, but this still allowed room for ten rows of spectators to be seated in front of the five demonstration boards on which top games could be followed. Unfortunately, the second weekend of play, 28-31* July, coincided with a hot sticky spell, and the air conditioning proved inadequate to cope with the presence of over a thousand bodies.

The Open drew 256 entries with a sizeable group from Yugoslavia including the veteran Karaklajic. It must be a record for a weekend event to contain around fifty players graded over 200—excepting this event last year! In such a talented gathering many strong players must fall by the way-side, and such big names as Rumens, Webb, Basman and Whiteley were early victims of less fancied players...
495 boards... that's considerably more than I had previously estimated. But I was right about it being too hot.

* I think there were just three days of play in the Open, so it should be 28-30 July unless there was further activity on the Monday that I don't know about.
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Nick Ivell
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Re: Cunard Hotel, Hammersmith Chess Tournament

Post by Nick Ivell » Thu Oct 21, 2021 5:48 pm

I have a dim memory of playing in a Hammersmith congress in 1974. My first London open.

Won by Keene, as I recall, with Speelman being angry about something at the prizegiving.

But my memory could easily be playing me false.

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