Good Luck in Leicester!

By my admittedly dodgy reckoning, over the coming week and a bit 14 KCC members are due to play in  the 2023 British Championships in Leicester. In fact, much to my surprise, the event already kicked off last night with the first rapidplay events, in which KCC had two representatives. Ben was first on the scoreboard with a first round win, but by the end Dhairya had overtaken him to finish on 4/9, with Ben close behind on 3.5 and both our guys gaining rating points.

More action is underway as I write this (Friday afternoon), with the first of 3 Rapidplay events. In the Open section, Ben is again in action, joined this time by Billy, while Rhys and Lionel are in the U1750. This section witnessed the first KCC v KCC battle with an honours even first round draw.

Jude is headlining our challenge, playing in the British Championship proper, where he finds himself seeded 47th. There may only be 5 GMs this year, but its still rather strong! Unless there are some late additions to, or defections from, the entries, t looks like he will be playing one of the Kanyamarala siblings from Ireland in Round 1 - who have identical ratings at 2344. But then again, he may play someone else entirely, as my understanding of swiss-system pairings is rather sketchy! Other participants in Championship events are Bruce B in the 50+ seniors; Ed in the 65+ seniors; Keatan in the U16; and Dhairya in the U12. Other KCC members in action are Joshua, Steph, George, Nigel and (the soon to be returning, we hope!) David.

Now, I have just checked back to a post on this Blog made by Joshua on August 8th 2015 (some of us have long memories!) where he summarised the performance of the KCC players the last time the British Championships were held in the Midlands - though Warwick University was much more convenient than De Montfort University is. There, KCC players managed a total of 121 games, scoring 56.5 pts (46.7%). We performed better in standardplay games, where we scored 28.5/55 - 51.8%. Sadly he does not list all the KCC participants, but I at least recall that Paul and I played in the Championship (and Andrew P who signed up for KCC during that very tournament), Bernard C and Mike in the Seniors, and Josh in the Major Open and just about every other tournament he could - some 43 games in total!  Well, I can report that both cumulative and individual totals will be beaten over the next week!

• Ben - 44 games (6 events)
• Billy - 37 games (5 events)
• Dhairya - 23 games ( events)
• Jude - 18 games (2 events)
• Joshua - 18 games (2 events) - not a very spirited defence of his title!
• Nigel - 17 games (3 events)
• Keatan - 16 games (2 events)
• Bruce B - 16 games (2 events)
• George - 16 games (2 events)
• Steph - 12 games (2 events)
• David - 12 games (2 events)
• Ed - 7 games (1 event)
• Rhys - 7 games (1 event)
• Lionel - 7 games (1 event)

(Apologies if I've missed anyone out, or missed an event here or there. I'm not perfect, you know!)

I almost added in our lock-down on-line member Solomon, who could have contributed another 30 games and 4 events to our total, but even I could see this would be pushing things a bit far!

Interestingly, in  our total of 250 games, the KCC participants will be playing considerably more speed chess than standardplay games:-

• Standard - 90 games
• Rapid - 90 games
• Blitz - 70 games

So whereas standardplay games accounted for 45.5% of the KCC activity in 2015, in 2023 it will be only 36%.  A sign of our younger demographic, I suspect!

And as I finish up, I see that Billy has just beaten the 2097 rated Stephen Ledger (brother of IM Andrew) in Rd 4 of the 1st Rapidplay Open and in Round 5 finds himself on Board 4 with 3/4! Lets hope for many more ratings upsets like these in the next 10 days!

Good luck to all KCC members playing in Leicester, and I look forward to seeing most of you at one time or another during my 3 planned spectating visits. 

BTW - In 2015, Joshua set himself the task of posting a report on each day of the event, a feat he repeated (nearly!) in Torquay in 2019. Given he will be spending hours everyday travelling on and waiting for trains (strike days excepted, I guess), I'm hoping he will be doing the same again to keep us all up to date with the action.