Congratulations to Alastair White and Raj Bhopal, who represented Scotland at the World Senior Team Championships in Rhodes this month.
Scotland finished in 21st position, exactly in line with their seeding. Alastair scored 4/8 on board 2, and Raj (pictued) scored 5.5/8 on board 3. Raj beat Russian master Shuspanov!
Next week sees the first evening of the club’s Johnny Marr Allegro championship (currently held by David Sime).
The first three rounds will take place on Tuesday, 16 April, and the second three rounds on Tuesday, 30 April. Ideally, entrants would play all six rounds but if that is not possible you are welcome to play on one of the two evenings. The time control will be 25 minutes with a two second increment for each move.The games will be rated.
If you intend to play, and have not already done so, please send your name and your grading (for Allegro if you have one and the normal time control grading if you do not) to Neil Berry before 9 PM on Sunday, 14 April.
If you are unable to make a decision on playing in advance, please arrive on each night by 7:25 PM at the latest, so you can be registered. The games will start at 7:45 PM or earlier if we are all assembled and ready. We expect to finish at 10:30 PM on each of the two nights.
Edinburgh 1 retained the Edinburgh League Premier League title this season. Our final tally of 6 wins, 3 draws and 1 defeat illustrates that this season the league was very competitive, with all teams capable of taking points off each other. Congratulations to the squad of Neil Berry, Hugh Brechin, Andrew Green, Paul Roberts, Graeme Kafka, Petros Wallden, David Sime, Calum MacQueen, Willie Rutherford and Andre Antunes!
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.
Today was the last match of the SNCL. The first team had a slim chance of the title, but we had to defeat the leaders Dundee City A and hope other results went our way. Unfortunately a strong Dundee team defeated us 4.5-0.5 to retain the title.
The second team needed to win to secure a top two finish and promotion from division 3. This we did with a 3-2 victory, congratulations to the team!
Thanks to everyone who played this season.
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.