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British Championships – Round Ten
Success! Black against Aaron Summerscale was always going to be difficult. He’s a very solid player and has a fairly low rating simply due to drawing with too many lower rated players (and full time coaching in schools tires one out). Last time we played he defeated me in the British Rapidplay after I overpressed…
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Round Nine – British Championships
Today was a little disappointing. After following Howell-Adams for the first 14 moves I couldn’t remember any more theory and my plausible move turned out to be an error which left me suffering. Hawkins pounced on the error, sacrificing a pawn to destroy my pawn structure and gaining the bishop pair. I was forced to…
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Round Eight – British Championships
After my loss yesterday I was keen to bounce back in round eight. I was paired against David Howell, a young talent who has matured from being simply a chess prodigy to a well rounded strong player and number four in England. I had the White pieces and decided to try repeating what worked so…
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Round Seven – British Championships
After a great evening at Terry’s we got up reasonably early on the rest day and played some tennis with him and Matt. It was good fun but I think we were all a bit slow after the previous evening! After that Sue and I walked over to the Botanical Gardens which were rather further…
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British Chess Championship – Round 6
Ok.I apologise in advance but I’m typing this during a very bumpy taxi ride out into the countryside. Terry Chapman had kindly invited us to dinner at his hotel this evening along with a few other chess players. All participants won their games with the host Terry drawing with GM Aaron Summerscale – good luck…
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British Chess Championship – Round 5
CHESS: I think we can call today’s game a success. I returned to my beloved Dragon and Mickey played the positional 9.0-0-0. I tried 15…Be6!? which hasn’t been seen so much in over-the-board play but Timofeev did use it to beat the Kalmykian prodigy Sjugirov while a fair few Correspondence players have tried it. Mickey…
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British Chess Championships – Round Four
Hey everyone. I’m writing a quick update personally while I try to get Sue interested in Les Miserables 🙂 My game against Susan Lalic went well today. The opening was an Advanced Caro-Kann and quickly an interesting imbalance emerged with me having the bishop pair but doubled c pawns against her central pawns. It was…
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British Chess Championship – Round 3
Yesterday Gawain drew with GM Stuart Conquest in an opening started out as 1Nf3 c5 2 c3. It was only 25 moves but don’t let that make you think it was a quick and easy draw. It was quite a complicated game and Gawain strayed a bit and was a pawn down in the final…
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British Chess Championship – Round 2
Gawain was in fine form today and his preparation worked well with a good advantage in the opening and managed to convert without too many problems. Something funny that happened is a finger fehler which I haven’t heard of before but it’s when your hand and brain don’t quite coordinate and your hands plays different…
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British Chess Championship – Round 1
Arrived safely at Sheffield and we’re about 5minutes walk away from the venue which is great. The first round started yesterday and the Top 4 managed to win 😉 – I mean, it is strange these accelerated pairings (Never can predict who you are playing) when the Top 4 are still playing after 5 and…
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British Championships
As I write this I’m on the train (First Class! Having such an organised manager to book all my tickets a long way in advance certainly helps) to Sheffield where the chess starts tomorrow. It’s a very strong British this year, much stronger than any I’ve ever played in before and perhaps the strongest ever.…
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Place your bets..
Ok – well if you know me, you would know that I’m not the kind of woman to bet and if you know my husband to be, you’d know that he’d bet on anything and everything (with my watchful eye hovering over him of course). Here’s Simon Williams interesting odds on who’s to win the…
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Rome & Corsica
Gawain the history buff will be back in Italy early September for the 1st edition of the Barclay’s International Tournament. Barclays is what I thought was an English bank but after a quick Wiki session I see that they are in over 50 countries! After that he’s booked to return back to Corsica where he reached the quarter…
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Commonwealth Championships Roundup
Hello again dear readers. Again apologies for the delay in uploading. The internet in South Africa was a bit temperamental, in the end I got online with a 3G usb modem but had to be a bit careful with my limit. Anyways, as you have seen the tournament was a success and I managed to…
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Simultaneous Exhbition
Gawain is back (YAY!) and has a pretty cool trophy which I can take a photo and upload later. Right now, we are in Lincoln, Lincolnshire for Gawain to do a simul which coincides with the Lincolnshire County Championship. There are 28 players playing and will take place from 4:30 pm and will run for approximately…
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Review: Bobby Fischer against the World
A while ago, Gawain and I went to see a preview of the new Bobby Fischer documentary “Bobby Fishcer against the World” in which we met fellow chess player GM Carlsen who Gawain had a quick fire interview with. Here below is Gawain’s review on the documentary which is having it’s London Premiere as we…
Got any book recommendations?