Category Archives: Club Events

As part of the Wednesday night Tiger Cubs training class the juniors got a taste of top class play when Freddie Waldhausen Gordon came along to give a simultaneous display on the 27th Nov. He even generously allowed multiple games to those who were defeated early, but still finished with a score of around played 20, won 20.

Undoubtedly a great learning experience for the juniors and an inspiration to see someone of similar age to them doing so well.

Our thanks to Freddie for taking the time from what must be an increasingly busy schedule to pass on his experience.

Club Blitz 2024 Championship
The end of season blitz tournament was again ably run by Andre on Tuesday 18th June over 10 rounds.

William Bennett being congratulated by everyone after winning!

The competition was contested by 19 players with the trophy (to be formally presented at the AGM in September) finally being won by recently returned club member (and Club Medallist in past years) William Bennett who achieved a score of 9/10.

William vs Ivar

William was closely chased into second place by Andre with a score of 8.5/10 and Graham took 3rd place from Findlay on a tie-break with both scoring of 7/10.

Andre vs Graham

A great time was had by all – an excellent evening.

s part of its bicentenary celebrations Edinburgh Chess Club hosted a Schaakstad Apeldoorn team from the Netherlands over the weekend of July 15 to 17th, 2022. 

The visitors had a very strong 10-man team, led by Team Captain IM Merijn van Delft, which included 2x IMs and 2x FMs!

We held a Blitz tournament on the Friday evening and then a 10-board match between an Edinburgh Club team and the Apeldoorn Schaakstad Club team on Saturday afternoon followed by dinner.

Altogether there were 27 players in Friday’s Blitz (3 minutes plus 2 seconds per move) with most players managing between 8 and 11 games in the evening.

The visitors were on fire with IM Merijn van Delft scoring 10/11 so he was declared the winner followed closely in second place by IM Nico Zwirs with 8/9. Highest scoring Edinburgh player was Willie Rutherford on 7.5/9.

The 10 board match (1.5 hours each per game plus 30 second increments per move) on Saturday was closely fought with the Edinburgh club eventually narrowly winning by the close margin of 5.5 to 4.5

The event was sponsored by Broadex Technologies with Edinburgh Napier University Conference & Events providing a sponsorship discount for the visiting team’s accommodation.

Broadex is a high-tech company with an engineering team and production facility in Livingston Scotland and headquartered in China.

replay of the original Edinburgh vs London correspondence chess match started last month (June 2022) over 42 boards inspired by the famous Edinburgh – London correspondence match from 1824.

Things are being done a little differently this time! Moves are being made online, and we are playing individually against a London side using the ICCF web server. The CC match is running from 2022 (the bicentenary of the club’s formation) through to 2024 (200 years since the original CC match started) with a standard CC time control of 10 days for 50 moves and allowing the use of computers. On each board we are competing against our opponent twice i.e. as white and black.

Both teams have fielded strong squads with representatives from both the OTB and CC worlds. For Edinburgh Club we are being led by two Scottish Champions and FM’s: Club President Neil Berry is on board one vs SIM Clive Frostick and Graham Morrison is taking up the following three boards playing against IM Jo Wharrier, SIM John Rhodes and GM John Brookes respectively!

Further down the board list we have players such as the current Scottish Correspondence Chess Champion CCM Al Buchan, CCM Peter Bennett and past ICCF President IM Alan Borwell. We are also delighted that a guest player for the club is chess historian SIM Tim Harding who has utilised the club’s archives for his work in the past.

The London team is being captained by Phil Beckett (who has been described as one of the “unsung heroes” of British Correspondence Chess – see Austin Lockwood’s bio on welshccf.org.uk) and amongst other things he currently acts as International Secretary and British Championship TD for the EFCC and also runs the Handicap Tourney for the BCCA.

The Edinburgh team captain Andre Antunes was pleased to report last week:

“We’re now 2 weeks into the match, and we already have some initial results! That’s incredibly fast for correspondence chess.

James Addison won both his games against Joyce Evans, and I also won one game against David Elwood, making the current score 3-0 in our favour. Still a lot to play, but definitely a good start!”

The club is very grateful for the assistance of Gordon Anderson (International Secretary, Treasurer and ICCF delegate at the SCCA) for helping to organise the event on the ICCF server and to Phil Beckett for arranging the London team.

For the full team list and current results see iccf.com.

I gave a talk at the club on 28th April on using computers to improve your game.  Here are the key points:

Chessbase

  • My database contains around 5 million games – this is probably fairly typical for CB Users.
  • The latest games can be downloaded from the Week in Chess and added easily to the database.
  • It is also possible to create a database of only Scottish tournament games.  However, there is some cleansing required as names are inputted in different formats.  The games can be found on the Chess Scotland website.
  • Chessbase can be used to conveniently store and analyse your own games, top level games and openings you are interested in.
  • You can search a particular opening position.  Chessbase will return all games in the database from this position (this can be filtered too), what score each move has from the position, who the best players to play each move are and other stats.
  • More advanced features are available, e.g. finding all games featuring a particular pawn structure.

Analysis Engines

  • Engines can be purchased as stand alone piece of software (e.g. Fritz, Rybka, Shredder) or downloaded for free, to be run in Chessbase (e.g. Stockfish, Critter).  An engine like Houdini was originally open source, but later versions are commercial.  If you already have Chessbase, it probably makes most sense to use the free engines – they are all incredibly strong.
  • There are other features available with the commercial software.  For example, purchasing Fritz will give you 1 year’s free membership on Playchess.com (a site for playing online blitz games).
  • Use the engines to analyse your own games (or top GM games you are studying).  Make sure you analyse the variations you considered during the game as well).
  • Trust the moves more than the evaluation.  The evaluation can change as you go through a complicated variation.  The other point is that the computer does not suffer from defending bad positions, and may assess a position as equal that humans would find extremely difficult to play.  Houdini is particularly bad for this – chess after all is just a draw!

I showed some interesting examples. Here is one, from Think Like a Grandmaster. This book has generally stood the test of time quite well, and it is only in the computer era that the following improvement is possible:

1.e8Q and now not 1…Rex8? when 2.Qxg7+! Bxg7 3.Rxe8+ leads to mate.  Black should instead play 1…Rd2+! Now taking the Rook allows Black to take the Queen on e8 safely, so White must play 2.Kh1.  Here the author recommends taking the draw with 2…Rd1+.  However, Black has 2…Rxb2! There are a number of wonderful variations, e.g. 3.Qce5 Rxe8 4.Qxc5 Rd8! or 3.Qee5 Rb3! 4.Qxc5 Bxc5.  Use an engine to check them out!