Month: October 2023

News you might have missed, 2020-2023

~ Chris G ~ Leave a comment

So it was March 2020 and everything was going rather well, and then Tynemouth A won Division 1 and the world ended.

By September 2021 we had managed to turn it off and on again, and so Northumberland’s League, KO and Individual competitions restarted with a few changes. One of the changes was that we didn’t tell you about any of the changes, since the Kraken had eaten the old website and we had to discontinue the Bulletin when we ran out of tin and bullets.

So for the casual spectators of the Northumbria League (hello, both of you), here’s where we are in October 2023:

  • Forest Hall Chess Club has moved back home to the Ex-Servicemen’s Club off Forest Hall Road, meeting on Fridays. They have also split in two: Tim Wall’s Newcastle Central Chess Club has set up shop in Tyneside Irish Centre on Mondays and has inherited Forest Hall A’s place in Division 1.
  • Jesmond Chess Club has moved to the Punch Bowl on Sandyford Jesmond Road.
  • Tynedale Chess Club has made a belated comeback. They are playing on Monday nights at Ovington Social Club, a stone’s throw from where it all started at Wylam Chess Club in the 1970s, if you can throw stones about 2 miles.
  • South Shields Chess Club are running Saturday afternoon sessions at The Word in South Shields Library, as well as their Thursday nights. I have been reassured that The Word is an event space, and is easy to tell apart from the rest of the words.
  • Gosforth Chess Club wanted to be on the front page. They have 9 teams and an ECF Club Of The Year award and are running junior training days on Saturdays.

The league has changed from 5 players on a team to 4. Since having an even number of boards is a slight advantage to the home team, every division is a double round-robin with 6 or 7 teams. This combined with the Queen’s Gambit Boom means we now need a Division 6 trophy for the first time ever.

The league fixtures are on the county’s LMS page and so will not be duplicated here, but a weekly roundup of results will be here. The league rules are on the Documents page in the menu bar.

Lara Barnes was elected President of the NCA for the five years 2020-2025. Stuart Skelsey of Forest Hall is Secretary, Andy Trevelyan of Jesmond is running the League and Summer KO, and your webmaster is me, Chris Goodall, though if anyone else wants to learn how to write words and hit Publish, I will gladly give you the password. (I did tell the committee I had a five-month-old daughter, but they didn’t seem keen for her to do it.)

We need more people to do things. Some things are being done by no-one (Trophies Secretary, Congress Organiser), and the people doing things now have been dropping hints about “succession planning”. If you want to do something and don’t know what it is, be a League Delegate! It’s all the fun of quarterly meetings in a pub with no actual duties, and statistically you have a 100% chance of being promoted to a post that does something.

Durham City has withdrawn from the Northumbria League, but is still going strong. Berwick and Haydon Bridge, in the county of Northumberland, have withdrawn from the Borders and South Tyne Leagues respectively and are on hiatus, as are the Meeple Perk board game cafe and the Newcastle Library chess club. 🕯️

We have resolved that Russian and Belarusian players are not barred from playing in our competitions (which flag is used to represent them is a matter for the ECF’s rating team), nor are trans women barred from competing as women.

Yichen Han is an IM, but he moved to Oxford so we don’t care. Max Turner is a CM and did not move to Oxford. Gosforth’s Future World Champions program is bearing fruit and you should look out for the names William Robinson and Emma Salazar Eyre.