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The Edinburgh and Lothians leagues have recently been completed for the season, and our teams’ results were as follows.

Premier

Our 1st team relinquished their oft-held title to Edinburgh West 1, and finished 2nd, just a point behind.

Division 1

This year we had three of the six teams in this division and they finished in the top three places. The 2nd team won decisively with a perfect match score of 20/20, while the 4th team were second on 10/20, and the 3rd team a point further back. Well done to all.

Division 2

Having only been promoted from Div 3 last year, our 5th team secured a very fine 3rd place in this division, behind the winners Wandering Dragons 2, and runners up Corstorphine 1.

Division 3

Tiger Cubs inevitably varies in strength from one year to the next so it was no surprise that having won this division last year, they finished in 9th place this time. Many of their matches were very close and could easily have gone the other way and seen them finish higher.

We ran a 6th team for the first time this year, and for many of them it was their first taste of league chess, so it was no disgrace to finish in last place. Valuable lessons will have been learned and they can look forward to building on their experience for next year.

Following up on the previous post here are the final placings and a short summary by Alan Scrimgour.

Scotland finished in 23rd position out of 42 teams, winning 4 matches and losing 5.
The players’ score were:

Peter Jamieson 4½/7
Alastair White 2/6
Alan Scrimgour 2½/7
David Levy 3½/7
Raj Bhopal 6½/8

It was good to finish with a win after a hard competition.
We all agreed that the tournament had been well run with friendly and
efficient arbiters in a spacious playing hall, the hotel was excellent and
Dresden an excellent location with many cultural attractions that would
make for a good city break destination.

Full report: www.chessscotland.com/news/european-seniors-dresden-2022/

Scotland's finest
Scotland’s finest – Photo by Alastair White

Club members Alastair White and Raj Bhopal are representing Scotland at the European Seniors team event for players over 65.

The team is performing pretty well so far with three wins (all 3-1) and four very narrow (2½-1½) losses. Alastair, playing mostly on board 2, has so far scored 4 draws and 1 loss, while Raj is in fine form with 4½/5 on board 4.

Details can be read on the Chess Scotland site

The following game is one by Raj

Notes by Raj
This was a tense positional struggle, where I had a modest advantage throughout most of the game. Black equalised once or twice but at no time had any advantage. Everything hung on whether White could take advantage of Black's bad Bishop.
Paradoxically, and surprisingly, White offered an exchange of bishops,
leaving knights and 6 pawns each. This offer of exchange must have come as a welcome relief, but exchanging bishops was a mistake for black. White's king penetrated into the black queenside. There seemed to be, nonetheless, an impasse. White had, however, reserved one tempo. P to a4 created a Zugwang. Black's blockading king had to give way for the loss of a pawn, making the a pawn passed. Black resigned on the 47th move when material was equal.

 

I’ve been making some changes to the technical capabilities of the menu system of the club’s main website to allow us to include more history, biographies, and articles. The first visible change is the addition of an Articles section under the History menu which has as its first entry an article I’ve been working on about the remarkable flowering of talent which occurred in junior chess in Edinburgh during the 1960s and 70s. This is entitled A Golden Age for Edinburgh Juniors – the 1960s and 70s.

I hope you enjoy it and if anyone has anything further that they can contribute to it then I’d be delighted to hear from you.

Equally if anyone would like to write anything about the club’s history or personalities then do contact me – bill@billmarshall.co.uk