English Chess Forum

As a follow-up to the Chess for Schools Project I would like to suggest a new initiative that might actually work :

Can we please donate at least one decent plastic set to each public house in the UK?

For once I am making a serious suggestion...

Following a match (Guildford 2 vs Kingston 1 in the Surrey League) we retired to Guildford Chess Club's local pub to find that they did not have a set behind the bar. I will give them one next time I'm there. Why not do the same?

John

chess is pubs is a good idea. Poker benfitted here but, like backgammon, does not need silence as competitive chess does.

Or what about Chess in Public Lavatories?

Booter is..... I use to think 3C's stood for Cocaine , Champagne and Chess...

John

Its no wonder you are such a prolific poster - this idea was suggested some twelve hours earlier in the General Chat - National Cask Ale week thread.

James Pratt wrote:
Or what about Chess in Public Lavatories?

Does George Michael play chess?

I hear that a once quite strong English player resides near or on Clapham Common?

J T Melsom wrote:John

Its no wonder you are such a prolific poster - this idea was suggested some twelve hours earlier in the General Chat - National Cask Ale week thread.

I know : it was such a good idea that I wanted to make it an official ECF project!

James Pratt wrote:chess is pubs is a good idea. Poker benfitted here but, like backgammon, does not need silence as competitive chess does.

Why is it axiomatic that competitive chess is played in silence? Pub chess as a sort of chess variant where people can talk as much as they like makes reasonably good sense. I remember suggesting going one step further to some colleagues in Gibraltar (we were propping up the bar at the time) - the idea of 'trash talk chess'. My idea was that, not only would talk not be banned, it would be positively encouraged. Bad-mouth your opponent all you want, say anything you like to put him/her off... the only barrier being public order legislation and the laws of slander. Of course it was the beer talking but one of my colleagues, Sean Hewitt, liked the idea, went away and tried a 'trash talk' tournament at his club in Leicestershire. He told me it went down pretty well! Not sure it was repeated, however. Might be as well to have an arbiter with some physical presence for when the furniture starts flying...

Rather more sensibly, I've heard of pub chess leagues where they play three or four boards of quick-ish chess in the bar of a pub, with no particular restriction on chatting (except that you can't proffer advice to each other). Such games couldn't be graded but it might help promote the game. Given that landlords are desperate for anything that might attract people into their premises these days, it might be a runner. One further suggestion I have - it might be a good idea to start such matches a bit later than the traditional 7.30pm used for conventional league matches. If pub matches started at, say, 9pm, you might find that more people could make themselves available, given that they would have had a chance to commute home, have a meal with the family - and avoid the so-called rush hour (which seems to go on to about 8pm these days). The other advantage of pub chess would be to advertise the fact that most chess players aren't weedy, bespectacled, middle-aged nerds. Except for me, of course, but I promise not to turn up and ruin our prospective new image.

See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_XIzQGR3JY for an exciting bit of pub sport...