Online Secondary School Chess Events 2023/24

[Neill Cooper]

There are three online chess events that secondary schools might like to take part in:

Ivan Gromov Online Schools Chess League
This is a fortnightly inter-school league played online on Thursday evenings. Matches consist of 6 boards and each player plays one game in the evening with a rate of play of 30 min + 10 sec, starting at 7.30pm and so finished by 9pm. 344 players from 22 schools took part last year and the match results can be found at https://ecflms.org.uk/lms/node/69978/ofixtures. If you are interested in joining for this coming year then please email Justin Moston [email protected]

National Online School Chess League.
This is a fortnightly inter-school league played online in school on Monday afternoons. Again it is teams of 6 players but a lichess.org battle format is used. After each round of games new divisions are formed for the next round. The first event this season is on Monday 18 September starting 4.15 finishing 5.15pm, with players being supervised in school. Past results and future dates can be found at https://lichess.org/team/noscl. If you are interested in joining then please email me at [email protected].

Inter-school lichess Battles
Fortnightly online “Battles” continue fortnightly on Fridays from 6 to 7pm on lichess Secondary School Chess. Events run last academic year can be seen at here where over 40 schools and 500 players took part with players varied in rating from over 2400 to below 700. The first lichess battle this term, with pupils normally playing at home, will be at 6pm on Friday 15th September. Any number of players from your school can take part – from one to dozens, with the best six contributing to your team’s total. Again, if you are interested in joining then please email me at [email protected].

I hope that schools will also want to play over the board chess and I will be circulating more details about that soon – but for the time being do look at the National School Chess Championships website https://www.englishchess.org.uk/NSCC/ for what is planned.