English Chess Forum

I suppose an announcement of the dates and format should be imminent.

The usual start date of 28th January 2023 is a Thursday and 5th January 2024 is a Fruday, That would give the option of running a nine, ten or eleven round tournament to finish on the Saturday or Sunday. There's also the potential choice of whether to run the weekend Congress on 6th and 7th January or 30th and 31st December.

The 4NCL are also using the weekend of 6th and 7th although that's Division 4 and one Division 3 rather than Divisions 1 & 2

Roger de Coverly wrote: ↑

Wed Jul 19, 2023 10:04 am

The usual start date of 28th January 2023 is a Thursday and 5th January 2024 is a Fruday, That would give the option of running a nine, ten or eleven round tournament to finish on the Saturday or Sunday. There's also the potential choice of whether to run the weekend Congress on 6th and 7th January or 30th and 31st December.

It was announced at the British that Hastings would be nine rounds from 28th Dec to 5th Jan with the weekender on the 6th and 7th. Stuart Conquest is taking over as director.

Roger de Coverly wrote: ↑

Sun Jul 23, 2023 6:18 pm

It was announced at the British that Hastings would be nine rounds from 28th Dec to 5th Jan with the weekender on the 6th and 7th.

There's a flier at the British which indicates that the first week tournaments will be six rounds starting on the afternoon of the 28th and finishing on the morning of the 31st. The second week tournaments will be five rounds starting on 1st January and finishing on the 5th. It isn't stated whether these will be morning play, afternoon play or both.

Details of the tournaments are now at the Hastings website.
https://hastingschess.com/events-23-24/

What isn't stated is how the rules for the rating restricted tournaments will be applied. Do they refer to FIDE ratings, ECF ratings, higher of the two, lower of the two and what ratings published date will be used?

For the restricted tournaments and the weekend open they are using the 110 10 move rate.

Various changes from the normal format:

1. 6 rounds in 4 days replaces the normal separate morning and afternoon Christmas tournaments. All rounds are shown as starting at 14.15 (an obvious error) so we can't yet tell how many morning rounds there will be. To be fair they sometimes adjust the number of rounds in these tournaments to allow for where the weekends appear in the schedule, but the traditional options of playing either morning or afternoon (or both) have been removed, so bad news for those of us who prefer one round a day.

2. The traditional concessions in entry fees for local residents and over 65s aren't there any more.

3. There is no mention of any commentary on the Masters - that will be missed by many of us.

Masters entrants

Maxime Lagarde is currently the highest rated, Ameet Ghasi is the highest rated English player

IMs Wadsworth, Royal, Willow, R Pert, and FM Derakhshani play, as does Bodhana Sivanandan

14 GMs and 13 IMs, so norm possibilities

I note that the legendary Hans Olav Lahlum is playing. He ran Gausdal for some years, and ran it extremely well.

There's an article on Hastings by ChessBase where Jürgen Brustkern is interviewed. It doesn't start well.

Q. "Will you be there?"
A. "No. I can no longer ignore the fact that Hastings in its current form has lost its magic and no longer appeals to me."

although later he says "there is a good chance that the 100th edition will be celebrated in December 2026. I'd like to be involved."

I thought I'd played him at Hastings, but, on checking my records, I haven't. I'm sure I played in the same section as him a few times though.

Ian Thompson wrote: ↑

Thu Dec 21, 2023 10:18 am

There's an article on Hastings by ChessBase where Jürgen Brustkern is interviewed. It doesn't start well.

Q. "Will you be there?"
A. "No. I can no longer ignore the fact that Hastings in its current form has lost its magic and no longer appeals to me."

although later he says "there is a good chance that the 100th edition will be celebrated in December 2026. I'd like to be involved."

I thought I'd played him at Hastings, but, on checking my records, I haven't. I'm sure I played in the same section as him a few times though.

I played him at Hastings in 1995. Apart from being rather fortunate to win the one moment that stuck in my mind was when he resigned by slamming his king down on its starting square. I don't recall us having a post mortem!

"No. I can no longer ignore the fact that Hastings in its current form has lost its magic and no longer appeals to me."

Same thing happened to me when they announced they were going to run it on the pier the following year, when I had just about frozen to death (indoors!!) on the pier the day before. I and others pointed out to the organizers that we thought their decision was crazy. They were unmoved.

Kevin Thurlow wrote: ↑

Thu Dec 21, 2023 1:38 pm

"No. I can no longer ignore the fact that Hastings in its current form has lost its magic and no longer appeals to me."

Same thing happened to me when they announced they were going to run it on the pier the following year, when I had just about frozen to death (indoors!!) on the pier the day before. I and others pointed out to the organizers that we thought their decision was crazy. They were unmoved.

The memory of the flooded toilets is not a pleasant one, thankfully I did swindle my way to an IM norm there though so the experience wasn't a totally negative one.

Round 1 pairings: https://chess-results.com/tnr841689.asp ... ES&flag=30

Does anyone know why Sarunas Sulskis is on top board? I don't have any issue with that myself, but wondered if this was a fixed board for some reason? As 11th seed, you would expect that pairing to be on board 11, and indeed you see a discontinuity in colours where you would insert this pairing, so I think it is a fixed board of some nature (apologies if the reason for this should be private).

An all-stars ENG clash on board 20!

WCM Sivanandan, Bodhana 1857 0 0 FM Derakhshani, Borna 2380

Christopher Kreuzer wrote: ↑

Wed Dec 27, 2023 9:58 pm

Does anyone know why Sarunas Sulskis is on top board? I don't have any issue with that myself, but wondered if this was a fixed board for some reason? As 11th seed, you would expect that pairing to be on board 11, and indeed you see a discontinuity in colours where you would insert this pairing, so I think it is a fixed board of some nature (apologies if the reason for this should be private).

An all-stars ENG clash on board 20!

WCM Sivanandan, Bodhana 1857 0 0 FM Derakhshani, Borna 2380

He won the event last year.

Ian Thompson has a tricky start...