Hampshire Chess Congress 2025

[GrahamStuart]

The annual Hampshire Chess Congress & Hampshire Individual Championships will take place from Friday 7th to Sunday 9th November 2025 at the Lysses House Hotel, 51 High Street, Fareham, Hampshire.

There are three sections this year with the Open and Major being ECF and Fide rated and the Minor ECF rated.

Open (ECF & FIDE rated)
Major (ECF & FIDE rated - under 1800 ECF rated (or U1800 Fide if no ECF rating))
Minor (under 1550)

Full details are available on the Hampshire Chess Website and entry form on Congress.Org

https://www.hampshirechess.co.uk/hampsh ... ress-2025/
https://congress.org.uk/congress/618/home

[GrahamStuart]

Just an update to advise that with 5 weeks to go we have 39 entries. We normally get a spike in entries in October, and with a capacity of 90 please monitor the entries if you are considering entering.

https://www.congress.org.uk/congress/618/home

[GrahamStuart]

The Hampshire Chess Congress is being held this weekend (7th to 9th November) at the Lysses House Hotel in Fareham with 91 players across three sections. Although the congress will decide various Hampshire Individual Champions, it certainly has an international feel to it.

As well as local players, we have entrants whose home countries include:

Azerbaijan
Guernsey (classified as a Crown Dependency)
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Norway
Türkiye
Uganda
Ukraine
Uzbekistan

We are also very lucky to have the 2022 British champion Harry Grieve participating who has only dropped 3 draws in 2025 from almost 50 games. He will be tough to stop!

Progress can be followed on Chess Results and LMS.

Chess Results
https://s1.chess-results.com/tnr1209525 ... 0&SNode=S0

LMS
https://lms.englishchess.org.uk/lms/event/8560/rounds

[GrahamStuart]

Andover's Petr Marusenko repeated his win from 2024, although this time he also qualified for the Hampshire Individual Championship, just dropping half a point from his five games. Dorset's junior Finn Schell held top seed Harry Grieve to a draw in the 2nd round. Harry withdrew in the last round whilst in joint first, which I am sure was a relief to the other players.
A report has been added to the HCA website detailing the other winners, and photos will be added to the Hampshire Chess History website shortly.
https://www.hampshirechess.co.uk/hca-co ... 5-summary/
https://hampshirechesshistory.co.uk/ham ... s-gallery/

Results
Open - https://s2.chess-results.com/tnr1209525 ... 0&SNode=S0
Major - https://s1.chess-results.com/tnr1209526 ... 0&SNode=S0
Minor - https://s2.chess-results.com/tnr1209527 ... 0&SNode=S0

Many thanks to the 90 players, with some exciting chess. I also noticed the popularity of the Caro-Kann currently, with Finn Schell mentioning that this was played in all of his games.

Petr being presented with the Silver Rook by HCA President Peter Eales