Caplin Hastings All-Play-All

[Kevin Thurlow]

I enjoyed watching the event and saw another nice queen ending a couple of rounds after the other one. Great stuff.

[Matthew Turner]

I hope people enjoyed the event. A few final observations from me

Firstly, I think we need to offer out heartfelt thanks to Caplin, and more specifically, John Ashworth, for making this happen.
Secondly, congratulations to David Howell on a fantastic victory. 9/11 is an amazing performance in that field

I think the format worked very well; it was a gruelling schedule and as soon as you'd finished one game you were back to thinking about the next. I'd certainly relish having another go, whether that be online or OTB. I thought I played pretty well and overall the standard was pretty high. In the luck stakes, I probably had more good luck than bad luck, so I'm happy with 50% and mid table respectability.

This was the first time I, and many of the other players, had used tornelo and it certainly took some getting used to. Thanks then to the organisers for arranging a pre-tournament practice, that was much appreciated. There were a number of comments that the interface was 'clunky'. It made one of my games very hard to play, and whilst the problem may have been at my end, it hasn't happened with any other interfaces. However, I think the main difficulty is that we are all so used to the idea of premoving online that it is difficult to adjust when this feature doesn't exist. I guess this will change as we get more used to tornelo or with the newly published FIDE rules tornelo decide to allow other features like premoving or auto-promotion.

Hastings obviously got me enthused because I found myself searching for online tournaments last night. I didn't have much success, so if anyone knows where I should be looking I'd be grateful for a heads up.

Thanks once again to everyone involved.

[Alex McFarlane]

Since Matt has raised the point of the platform used I should, perhaps, make a few points.

Tornelo is the platform of choice of the European Chess Union. This means that all European Online Championships are played using Tornelo. This was not, however, the reason that Tornelo was chosen for this event.

Prior to the event it was known that FIDE was going to produce a set of Laws for Online Chess to come into effect on 1st January. What was not known until the Laws were actually published in early January was what the FIDE decision was going to be on draws by repetition or 50 move rule. Even though I had some input into these Laws I was not sure which way FIDE would decide. Tornelo was the only platform which allowed the required flexibility to conform with whichever version of the Laws was finally decided upon.
It was therefore almost a no-brainer to choose the platform that was certain to conform to the Laws, whatever they were!

As it turned out other platforms would have conformed too, but that was not known, nor indeed confirmed until the Laws were published on 4th January.

[Matthew Turner]

In simple terms, Tornelo has more (potential) input from the arbiters and less input from the platform which has obvious advantages for 'serious' events.

[Roger de Coverly]

what the FIDE decision was going to be on draws by repetition or 50 move rule.

Personally I think FIDE made the wrong decision. What was wrong with having threefold and fifty move claims the responsibility of the players to claim? There's the relatively recent fivefold and seventy five move draws by arbiter award to be programmed into the servers.

The other possible variance from the OTB Laws is whether King + Knight v King + Knight etc. is an automatic draw award.

[Roger de Coverly]

In simple terms, Tornelo has more (potential) input from the arbiters and less input from the platform which has obvious advantages for 'serious' events.

Presumably it avoids the issue that players can be banned by the platform for unspecified or undocumented reasons.

[Matthew Turner]

In simple terms, Tornelo has more (potential) input from the arbiters and less input from the platform which has obvious advantages for 'serious' events.

Presumably it avoids the issue that players can be banned by the platform for unspecified or undocumented reasons.

There are plenty of other places for you to repeat your same points ad infinitum, but it is more a case of being able to restart a game where a player is disconnected, players being able to call an arbiter, the ability to stop the clocks etc. etc.