Hi guys, I’m now officially “English” for chess purposes. Having lived in England for the last 2 and a half years as well as being here (in Europe) for the future it made sense to change federation. I also wanted to challenge myself to get better and I felt that if I stayed with the New Zealand Chess Federation (NZCF) I would be able to stay in my comfort zone and play chess for the next 20 years without having to do much work. Now that I’ve changed to England , I’m now ranked 14 and at the moment, it is giving me the motivation to work harder. I’m hoping to first of all break 2100 and then we will see for the future.
At the moment, I’m playing for the Hammersmith Chess Club in various leagues and this morning,I’ll be at the Metropolitan Congress (you may find more info on their website) held in Central London. In the past, I’ve refused to play non FIDE rated chess but after a eureka moment where I realized that I managed to get to 1900 by playing at 4 chess clubs in my youth, I’ve decided I need to focus on playing. So I’m now very ECF Grade orientated (179 at the moment) but I will also try to get in some FIDE rated weekend of which there is a U2200 Congress in Hampstead late November as well as the fantastic e2e4 tournaments.
I hope the 3 rounds today won’t tired me and I’ll tweet my score (as long as it’s not too embarrassing . Actually, I have now gone back to such a basic phone I won’t be able to tweet live from the event but will upload some sort of tweet at the end of the day. Fingers crossed!