Category Archives: News

Edinburgh 5 had a new look for 2018/19 – New captain (Jen), 4 new club members, and ambitions to improve on last season’s embarrassing number of board and match defaults.

As the club’s entry level team, we also agreed it was important to make sure everyone who wanted to had the opportunity to play competitive chess and that we’d have some fun while we were at it!

Flying Start

Despite our humble aims, we quickly established ourselves as Division 3 contenders with wins against Tiger Cubs and Pentland Hills, followed by a hard-fought 3-3 draw against Civil Service 3. We were lower rated on every board, but Paul R, Alex and Jen all pulled off excellent wins.

After convincing wins against both Corstorphine sides (2 &3), the title fight was looking incredibly close, with Edinburgh 5, Bank of Scotland 3 and Musselburgh all still unbeaten.

Tense at the top

Next up, Bank of Scotland, who had beaten Musselburgh the week before to go top. A stellar performance all round was rewarded with a season’s best 5-1 win, not letting the Bank score a full point on any board.

Now the pressure was on with a tough away trip to Musselburgh. Unfortunately, we got off to a bad start with Paul R on board 2 falling for the “Levenfish” trap in the Sicilian opening. Despite draws for Dennis and Allan and a win for Jen, we lost 4-2 to leave the title fight out of our hands.

Nervous Wait

After a comfortable win against Sandy Bells, we were waiting for other results to find out if we would come 1st, 2nd or 3rd in the league. Musselburgh finished the season with a 3.5-2.5 win to guarantee their position as champions by one point. Bank of Scotland drew with CS3, so it went down to boards difference to determine the runner-up spot and promotion play-off.

Every board counts – we made the play-offs by 30 points to 28.5 and would get to take on Edinburgh West 2 for a place in Division 2 next season!

Play-offs

Full of ambition but knowing we were the underdogs, we fielded our strongest team and stand-in Captain Dennis did his best Alex Ferguson pep-talk to rally the troops.

Edinburgh West defaulted board 6 to give us a 1-0 head start, but with their top 2 players rated 1660 and 1641, there was little room for complacency.

Paul R got things going with a quick win, but Gregor was defeated by their experienced captain. Danny pulled off the result of the season with a masterful win in the endgame on board 1, and wins for Dennis and Bill brought us home to a 5-1 victory.

Team effort

A real team effort to secure promotion – we look forward to an even tougher challenge next season!

(And defaults..what defaults? Well ok, we conceded one board due to a late sickness, but we did pick a full team for every game and even had a substitute on several occasions!)

Mission accomplished, and then some!

Edinburgh 5 Squad  2018/19– Danny Ranson, Gregor McIntosh, Paul Robertson, Dennis Anderson, Bill Platts, Paul Patras, Allan Buchan, Harry Joll, Alex Scholes, Jen Shelley.

Team Awards

  • Most Capped – Allan 9 appearances (including 1 default)
  • Best Score – Dennis 6.5/8
  • Game of the Season – Danny’s play-off win
  • Biggest Upset – Jen beat a CS3 player graded 270 points higher
  • Embarrassing Moment – Allan falling foul of the “touch-piece” rule to go a queen down against Corstorphine?! Somehow, he managed to scrape a win!
  • Chess Lesson – The Levenfish attack (Thanks Paul R!)

Full Division 3 results available here

On Tuesday 19th March Candidate Master Andrew Green gave a talk to the club members. Andrew works as a full time chess coach, and has lots of experience in coaching many Scottish junior internationalists.

Andrew explained a few topics with great clarity. He gave a simple method of evaluating positions (MAPS – material, activity, pawn structure, space), and explained the “Capablanca rule” of how to use your pawns to play against the enemy Bishop. This isn’t a particularly well known concept, and made an impression on me as I had recently seen the same idea in a Chess24 video from GM Laurent Fressinet:

This position comes from 2 computer games, Stockfish against Google’s Alpha Zero, famous for getting its strength from purely playing against itself millions of times. Alpha Zero has “taught” itself Capablanca’s rule, and was able to restrict the dark squared bishop by 1…f6! 2.c3 g5! 3.Bd2 a5!, and Black is fine.

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We played Bon Accord in the Richardson Cup semi final yesterday:

Bon Accord 1.5-6.5 Edinburgh

Murad Abdulla 0-1 Calin Gheorghiu
Hamish Olson 1-0 Neil Berry
Daniel Maxwell 0-1 Calum MacQueen
Euan Gray 0-1 Petros Wallden
Richard Jennings 0-1 Andrew Green
Jeremy Mitchell 0-1 Alastair White
Mike Cavanagh draw David Sime
Kylan Kante 0-1 Raj Bhopal

An excellent result! Thanks to Keith Rose of Castehill for hosting us. The other semi final between Edinburgh West and Phones takes place next Saturday (at the club!). Final is provisionally on Sunday April 14th.

Good results all round for both teams in day 3 of the SNCL in Dunfermline. The 1st Team beat Hamilton and Stepps Warriors, both with a 3-2 scoreline. The 2nd Team recorded wins against Pentland Hills (3-2) and Oban 4-1. Both Teams lie 3rd with 1 round to play.

The 2nd Team have some chance of promotion to Division 2. They need to beat Musselburgh and hope that CSBOS can win against East Kilbride.

The SNCL Organising Team, led by GLynis Grant, announced that next season will be their final one in charge. They have run the SNCL for a number of years (decades?), and the league is as strong and well supported as I can remember.

Dear club members

On 22 January 2019 the club innovated (at least in modern times) by playing an odds competition. There were two teams comprising of the stronger four players, and the less strong four players. The stronger player gave up one pawn for every hundred point difference in their grading compared to the the less strong player. A maximum of seven pawns or their equivalent could be removed from the board. In one game the stronger player chose the material to be given up and in the other game the opponent chose the material.

There were substantial differences between the opponents in grading. Under normal circumstances, we might have expected the result to be a resounding win for the stronger players, perhaps 7:1 or thereabouts.

However, the result was 3.5-4.5  i.e. the stronger players lost. It was an interesting and fun evening. The result indicated that the odds we chose were roughly right for allowing unequal battle between two dissimilar players. In many ways, this resembled the handicapping system in golf where players of different abilities can compete more or less equally, thus maintaining the sense of competition.

Raj Bhopal