English Chess Forum

The recent (2019) book "Side-stepping mainline theory" by Gerard Welling and Steve Giddins (which advocates playing Philidor type structures as both black and white) contains a move (Qe8) which it describes as "the Pickett Shuffle".

Why not start the games as 90 minutes + 30 second increment for the first 60 moves then reduce the increment to 10 seconds. Players would need to be reminded of this change in increment by placing a printed card next to every board. In fact this should probably be done now, even when there is no cha...

John Upham wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 27, 2026 10:12 am

Do we know what her reasoning was for doing this?

Leftist feminism.

Angela Eagle was responsible for changing the female British champion title to "Womens" from "Ladies". She persuaded Stewart Reuben to do this at the 2008 British Championships at Liverpool.

Over the years Guildford B has beaten Guildford A on a few occasions (Surrey Border League). Once when Guildford 2 beat Guildford 1 (Surrey League) another club made an official complaint.

I own the 1st edition of this book, bought in 1976 or 1977 (which I can tell from the address I wrote inside the cover) and page 100 corresponds exactly to the version given above. I checked the position in diagram 161 and it corresponds to the position after move 18 as recorded in chessgames.com. E...

According to the latest issue of Chess magazine (arrived earlier this week): "I have good news. The new shop will be opening in July, all being well, and not too far from the old one. The location will, indeed, be in central London and I look forward to seeing you all there. Watch the website chess....

I used to go the MSO alongside many other chessplayers. I went particularly to play Entropy and there were several chessplayers who were MSO Entropy Champions on more than one occasion including Demis Hassabis, Peter Horlock (Godalming) and Alain Dekker (who used to play at Guildford).

We play Kriegspiel, but I'm not sure if a chess variant is a legitimate answer, here.

Paul, I think you are wrong in saying the ECF isn't democratic. Most of the representatives on Council are representing counties, leagues and tournament organisers. Recently there has been an attempt to give individual members a say by allowing the membership to elect representatives on council and ...

Whether people would pay income tax voluntarily seems irrelevant. Whether people would pay ECF membership voluntarily is the question. They did in England during covid. They do in other countries. Chess Scotland exists, for example. I accept you probably need at least a thousand people who would pa...

While the detail of how much the subs are/ should be is arguable you need a compulsory membership system to fund what the ECF does. If you made it voluntary (so regular players in tournaments and leagues could opt out of paying) then the ECF would collapse. The membership system is better (because o...

... East Surrey Council is a new council that will come into existence on the 1 April 2027. It replaces Surrey County Council and the district councils of Elmbridge, Epsom and Ewell, Mole Valley, Reigate and Banstead and Tandridge. Ditto West Surrey. For some reason ( :roll: ) the councils being re...

An interesting thing about Znosko-Borovsky is that (as far as I can recall) he was the only Russian player who wrote general instructional books on chess that were available to buy 60 years ago. (Other books about Russian chess were games collections, e.g. Alekhine, Botvinnik, then later Karpov's bo...

Presumably not until all those results (that went missing) are resubmitted?