English Chess Forum

Keith played at one of the early English Senior Championships organised by Neil Graham at Dovedale. We had a chat about golf - his handicap was 14, respectable club standard. I've never been better than 19 myself. As Keith was excellent at cricket and squash, I wonder if his handicap might have bee...

My suspicion is that this user has been deliberately losing games in order to get back to the 1500 starting rating in order to do a speedrun back up to his usual rating. He has got back down to 1500 twice only to quickly start winning again back up to his usual standard. The concept of a chess spee...

maybe in June /July time but we need to agreed on the membership fees 1st Hopefully they will remain unchanged ,,,,but a reduction for returning members, who missed joining last year, could tempt people to join early. I thought I read somewhere that there might be another incentive to join the ECF ...

So nothing I could find evidence of, but multiple rumours of past obnoxious behaviours. As someone on the receiving end, I can say he's the only person I've ever played where the (American) arbiter thought it appropriate to apologise to me for his behaviour once the game was over. That left me wond...

The player was breaking the rules, the system caught him and he was flagged. It was an innocent mistake and the player was unaware that they were breaking the rules. What rule do you think the player was breaking? As far as I know there is no rule prohibiting someone from playing against a relative...

MJMcCready wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 07, 2021 3:04 pm

Can you find the move which did it

Yes

MJMcCready wrote: ↑

Wed Apr 07, 2021 3:04 pm

can it be beaten in a single move in seperate puzzle?

No. I think it's easily demonstrated that 10 is the limit - when a piece moves it can result in at most 3 discovered checks by another piece, plus a maximum of 7 direct checks by a knight.

The old chess Devon site usually had the WECU games available for download and I have built a probably incomplete collection of games from this and other British events. My download doesn't have either Thompson or Abbott in it suggesting they were in the second section. You're probably right. They ...

2009 G. P. Taylor I'm not sure about that. The ECF Grading record for the event suggests MV Abbott or R Thompson won it, although it's not helpful that all sections have been graded as one. I'm assuming both players who scored 6 points, and the other two 5.5 point scorers, weren't playing in the Ch...

Matthew Turner wrote: ↑

Tue Apr 06, 2021 9:27 pm

I think 2010 should be P. Helbig

The ECF Grading record for the event confirms this, assuming neither of Stephen Berry and Andrew Smith were eligible.

The WECU has a new website, created a few days ago - http://www.cornwallchess.org.uk/wecu/.

I've been in touch with the Webmaster. It's in its early days at the moment, but if anyone can help fill in the question marks in the WECU Championship records that would be appreciated.

"There're programs which are designed to help people cheat in a way that evades detection. The program makes some human mistakes but still plays at GM strength." How can a computer possibly know what a human mistake is. Getting a computer to suddenly decide now is the time to slip in a human blunde...

Yes, for the purposes of this example, player X has bridged the gap from say 1900 to 2400, to the point where they are routinely beating/and or drawing a range of GM's, IM's and FM's. Non-blitz loses are now a rarity. I wonder if players who are cheating online and getting results like this have gi...

[Picture can be seen in original post here , can anyone say what style set that is?] Home-made, poor quality, I'd say. Just look at the extra large black pawn on f7, the slightly larger white pawn on h2, the two bishops being of different sizes (for both white and black) and the abnormal sizes of d...

Is it really correct that he was paying 1/9 per magazine to have them printed and then selling them for 1/- including postage?

(1/9 in 1935 would be £6.44 today, which seems very expensive.)

But weren't they asked, in effect, whether they were willing to risk being disqualified if it was suspected that they were cheating, because that's what the regulations said? I don't think so. The regulations are still linked to on the ECF web site. Perhaps the regulations were changed before the e...