Horsham Chess Club

This summer Horsham Chess Club is hosting a series of tournaments and events given below. To enter you simply need to turn up on the night. The tournaments are casual tournaments so if you wish to leave part-way through that is no problem.
8th July - Racing Kings Tournament. Racing Kings is a variant where you aim to get your King to the other side, checks are not allowed. Please see the image for the starting position of this exciting and slightly crazy variant.

This Tuesday (1st July) saw the club hosting a King-of-the-Hill Blitz Tournament. The tournament took place over 5 double rounds using the unusual McMahon-Swiss pairing system.
From the start top seed Mark showed his brilliance to run away with the tournament, winning 9 games, drawing 1, and losing 0. In my own games against Mark it felt like the rest of us were still playing chess whilst Mark had already mastered King-of-the-Hill. A thoroughly deserved winner!

Last night was a busy one (as can be seen from the photo!) that saw the 10th and final round of the club championship Swiss competition...

An exciting night of chess with only ten seconds per move and the usual mistakes showed up... on my board at least!

There were 21 players split into three divisions with the winners going through to the final. Anthony Higgs, James Mansson and Daniel Miller all had perfect scores from their division and battled in a tense series of final matches.

Horsham 1 finished the season with a 3-1 win over Eastbourne 1.

First game to finish was on board one, where Gavin Lock's opponent failed to turn up, giving him a win by default.

Next, James McGrath played out a solid draw on board four as White against Paul Carpenter.

The final two games were closer.

At one point late on, James Mansson, who was Black against Oliver Froom on board three, was offered a draw, which he declined as Mark Broom, who was White against Rasa Norinkeviciute on board two, seem to be in trouble.

A weakened Horsham 1 lost narrowly to Bexhill 1 at the start of April.

With none of the team's top three players available, James Mansson was on board one, Phil Stimpson on board two, James McGrath on board three and Rob McDonald on board four.

James Mansson drew with Howard Tebbs in a game where he initially gained an advantage, but subsequently got into trouble and was a little lucky to share the point.

Phil Stimpson played solidly to draw with Anh Nguyen.

James McGrath was gradually ground down by Michael Hubbard.

It's been a busy few weeks for Horsham 2 with 4 games in as many weeks.

Firstly Crowborough away on a Friday night was looking touch and go if there were going to be 4 Horsham players turning up, many thanks to Daniel and Julie for playing in the end. Julie fell foul of a nasty attack in a Scotch gambit while Daniel was pressing in a rook endgame that ended in a draw. Alex missed his chance for a draw after sacrificing his queen to defend against a very strong junior and my own game was stopped by the match clock after 2 exchange sacrifices to lock the position into a draw.

In a sequence that summed up the team's season, Horsham 1 veered from disaster to triumph in consecutive matches, as they slumped to a big loss against Hastings 1 before they scored a narrow but deserved victory over a very strong East Grinstead 1 team.

In the Hastings 1 match, Horsham 1 went down at home by the margin of 0.5-3.5, with most boards suffering some sort of disaster. Only James Mansson was able to escape with a draw.

With my visits to the club heavily curtailed, I have been playing in a 4NCL online tournament, 7 rounds played fortnightly with a time control of 45+15.

This position arose in my latest game as white after my opponent played Bd6-Bb8...

Horsham 2 ventured down to Worthing for the halfway mark of the season. Unfortunately I missed this game with Roy volunteering as captain on the night. A very close loss of 2.5-1.5 against a strong team, disappointing that it only came down to one board in the end.

A comment from Ian about his game below.