Dominic Fogg and Miles O’Brien were joint winners of the club’s first evening rapidplay, played at the Richard Mayo Centre, United Reformed Church, Kingston on 12 October 2026
When Kingston moved to the United Reformed Church last season, we decided to start offering rated friendlies at classical time controls to members of the club. This has proved a significant success, thanks to the unstinting work of Ed Mospan – who organises the pairings and rates the games – and fellow club-night organiser Genc Tasbasi.
Monday 12 October saw an important step forward in this plan to offer members more than the usual diet of club matches and casual chess: the inaugural evening rapidplay, played over three rounds as an experiment to see if it could be run alongside two league matches and eight classical rated friendlies.
That meant we had 24 players engaged in league chess, 16 playing friendlies at a time control of 75 minutes and 10 seconds, and another 16 who chose to play in the rapidplay tournament. It meant a very full house, an enormous amount of work for the indefatigable Ed Mospan, and a lot of shushing from me as I tried to keep noise levels down to a reasonable level.
The rapidplay tournament, won jointly by Dominic Fogg and Miles O’Brien with 3/3, was deemed a great success. My only observation was that we needed a fourth round to determine an outright winner. Three rounds at 10 minutes plus a five-second increment meant a fairly early finish, so it should be possible to get at least one more round in and possibly two if the field expands to, say, 24 and an extra round is required to establish a winner.
It would also be possible to adjust the time control to make it a little less blitzy. Again it is a personal opinion and Ed, as controller, will have the final say, but 15+5 strikes me as a better intermediate version of the game between blitz and classical. We will now review the experiment and make any necessary refinements in time for a tournament planned for 9 November. From the New Year, the hope is to make the rapidplays fortnightly, though with members still being given the option of a classical rated friendly every Monday if they are not engaged in a league match and that is their preference.
The rapidplay games are rated and offer serious competition, but they avoid the situation where a major blunder in the opening in a game slated to last three hours means you get a very early finish or an evening of back-to-the-wall torture with no real prospect of reversing the initial error. With a four- or five-round rapidplay, you accept the loss, reset the pieces and go again with even greater determination.
Stephen Moss is captain of Kingston Chess Club
