FM Julian Way spearheads start of a monthly online club that aims to complement the weekly in-person meet-ups

Sunday 16 January saw the start of what we are grandiosely calling Kingston Chess Club Online. It does what it says on the tin: it’s the club meeting in online form, initially once a month, to back up our weekly in-person meetings. FM Julian Way, a pillar of the Kingston club for 30 years, is the driving force behind the initiative, and gave the opening talk, based on a game former world champion Mikhail Tal played against the East German international master Reinhart Fuchs in 1964.

The game was not one of Tal’s attacking gems, but a relatively quiet positional game where he won a pawn early on and proceeded to win very simply and smoothly. A textbook example of how to exploit a space advantage, judge an endgame plus, and make a bishop count against a increasingly desperate knight. An instructive game by a great master.

The idea is that we will use the monthly online meet-ups to study games, work on openings, look at endgame studies and commission talks, while holding online club tournaments and simuls by visiting expert-level players on some other Sundays in the month. The club wishes to thank Julian for facilitating the online club, which meets by Zoom, and for offering to help run it in the future. It promises to be a hugely important addition to Kingston as it seeks to emerge from the pandemic and develop as an organisation that wants to cater for both experienced league and tournament chess players and the new generation of chess wannabes that got interested in the game during lockdown.

Kingston Chess Club online will now settle into a monthly pattern – meeting on the last Sunday of each month. Michael Healey will lead the next discussion, looking at the life and games of Russian grandmaster and former Soviet champion Yuri Averbakh, who will be 100 years old on 8 February.

Stephen Moss

The club is now taking a break until the scheduled resumption of the season on 10 January. Meeting that schedule will of course depend on whether there is a further tightening of government restrictions on socialising in the next three weeks, and on what attitude the leagues in which Kingston plays take to the spread of the Omicron variant. Although the club is not holding any events, there is at present nothing to stop members from visiting the Willoughby Arms to play casual chess. The club will continue to monitor the Covid situation and will update the events calendar and issue further bulletins here as required. Happy Christmas and best wishes for a more buoyant New Year than we have enjoyed over the past 22 months.

John Foley, chair, Kingston Chess Club

Talented Kingston player returns to winning ways

Peter Lalić won the Blitz Tournament at the London Chess Classic on Sunday 5 December with an impressive 9.5/11, half a point ahead of Harry Grieve and two points ahead of grandmaster Keith Arkell, who was the top-rated entrant (2398). This was the third blitz in a series of four in the London Classic festival.

The Classic is an annual event that brings the cream of international chess masters to London. Due to Covid, the Classic was cancelled last year, and this year it has had to be scaled down. The World Chess Championship in Dubai has also diverted the chess world’s attention away from London. The associated London Chess Conference which I direct has also been postponed until a more propitious date in the New Year.

The blitz tournaments are the only London Classic events which are open to all – the other events are invitation only. The entry fee is £15 and the time control is the nowadays unusual “all moves in five minutes”. This gives rise to some fraught disputes mainly about not placing the pieces in the centre of the square, which unfortunately was also the case during this event. The games were FIDE blitz rated. The first prize of £250 was the first prize money Peter, who took a sabbatical from competitive chess before making a welcome return in the summer, has won in seven years. With a performance rating of 2337, he will not have to wait very long until his next prize.

Peter’s path to victory was as difficult as it gets because he played against all of the top contenders. In round 3, he beat FM Tarun Kanyamarala, the young prodigy from Dublin, who won the 1st EJCOA Forest Hall Invitational event in Newcastle in October with a performance rating of 2508. In round 4, he beat FM Harry Grieve, a mathematics undergraduate at Cambridge who plays for the well-funded Guildford Young Guns 4NCL team and has been tipped by leading English trainer IM Andrew Martin as a future grandmaster. In round 5, he drew with the Canadian FM Tanraj Sohal, a pan-American blitz chess champion, who won the second blitz in the London Classic series 9/11 after drawing with Peter in the final round on the previous evening. In round 6, Peter lost to Keith Arkell, the ubiquitous chess weekender. This is the second time that Keith has beaten a Kingston player recently and plans are afoot to spring an anti-Arkell trap next time. In round 8, Peter defeated IM Ezra Kirk (2308), and in round 10 swept aside the young prodigy FM Shreyas Royal. By the time he reached the last round, there were no comparable players left to pair, and Peter faced Heinrich Basson from South Africa, who had scored 2.5 points fewer. Basson did not present any obstacle.

Final results

Peter has a remarkable memory for chess and was able to reconstruct all 11 of the games he played in winning the event. He also performed well in the second of the four London Classic blitz tournaments, and here is his victory in the penultimate round against Harry Grieve.

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Healey runner-up at Golders Green

In a double success for Kingston players at the weekend, Mike Healey obtained second place behind Alexander Cherniaev at the Golders Green RapidPlay on Saturday 4 December, scoring 5/6. Mike lost to perennial winner Cherniaev at their encounter in the penultimate round.

John Foley

David Maycock came third in the strong 4NCL Hull Open held over the weekend 22-24 October 2021. Sharing first place were GM Peter Wells and Steven A Jones on 4.5/5. David shared 3rd place with GMs Mark Hebden and Keith Arkell and Marco Gallana from Italy who all scored 4/5. David, who moved to Kingston from Mexico a few months ago, has been working to improve his over the board chess after a period of enforced abstinence during Covid. His performance rating for the event was Elo 2402.

David rode his luck especially in the final game against the strong amateur John G Cooper. David was unfortunately paired with fellow Kingstonian Peter Lalić in the fourth round. This was the only game which Peter lost, ending on 50% overall.

Final Results

After over a decade we have decided to switch the site to WordPress which we hope be easier for some of our members to use. We have decided not to transfer our historical articles at this stage. Perhaps we will publish some of the more interesting ones from time to time in the future. The club actually won Club Website of the Year a few years back on the strength of these articles, which were written in the early days of chess club websites. We are grateful to Michael Bennett for having hosted us with TextPattern since the beginning.

The plan is to start afresh with members’ games and match reports. It seems we are at the start of a new era, and we are wiping the slate clean. The pandemic has changed the way we do chess. We have met together online. We play in “beach huts” in the pub garden. There are several new members and some older, more vulnerable, members have been staying away.

It is extraordinary to think that the club was founded in 1875 (though we accept the evidence for its launch in that year is a little sketchy), and is still going after many transformations. We look forward to reaching our sesquicentennial year in 2025 and have begun to make plans. Our ideas include writing a brief history of Kingston Chess Club and running a chess festival in the market square in Kingston. One can never start planning too early.

The club has thrived and survived due to the diligence of a large number of people over the years. We have not taken advantage of social media as much as we could have. Traditionally, chess players moving to Kingston would seek out their local club, but those simple days have passed. Nowadays a chess club must be active on Twitter and other outlets, even if many of the members reject such platforms for themselves.

People join the club to play chess over the board. Playing online does not have the social element. Come along to the club and you will meet other people with a shared interest. Some members are very serious about improving their chess; others prefer to engage in conversations starting with chess but never limited to chess. If you want to drop by on a Monday evening you are always welcome.