British championship report (part 1)

Since Mark did mention it in his message, I feel I should bring at least some news from the event. The number of posts you get is entirely dependent on the quality of the Wi-Fi on the Leicester-Nuneaton railway, so I’m guessing there won’t be all that many.

Kenilworth players update so far, as of 18:03 on Sunday 23^rd (assuming Marks original list is correct):

• Ben: 8.5/21
• Billy: 7/12
• Dhairya: 4/9
• Jude: 0/1
• Joshua: 0/2 (but will be 7/9 obviously)
• Nigel: 2/5
• Keatan: 0/0
• Bruce: 0/0
• George: 0/0
• Steph: 0/0
• David: 3/5
• Ed: 0/0
• Rhys: 3.5/7
• Lionel: 4/7

That makes a grand total of 32/69 so far, for 46.4% (assuming you can trust my train mathematics). Some room for improvement there I would say.

I can tell you very little about the quality of the games outside of my own, as the event is being played across a number of different rooms, and my tournament appears to have been shoved into a corner all by itself, so I basically can’t see any of the other tournaments that are going on. On day 1 the doors were all closed so you couldn’t easily access the other rooms, and on day 2 as I went to look in the other rooms a Kenilworth player (who to maintain some anonymity I will call by a pseudonym of Mark P Horseman) informed me that I shouldn’t be in the room with the good championship players, and sent me back off to my corner again. Hopefully once more events start on Monday I won’t feel quite so alone.

I can tell you very succinctly about the quality of the games that I have played – poor to abysmal. Two well deserved defeats to players rated lower than, but clearly much better than, myself, so we will have to cope that 7/9 will be enough to quality me for the big boys room next year (as obviously I’m definitely going to win my next 7 games, given this start). I think it might be time for a King’s gambit tomorrow – it really is that bad.

The event is being played at de Montford University, which those of you who had an extremely eccentric choice of subject matter at GCSE history will know, is named after Simon de Montford, who was basically the Oliver Cromwell equivalent in what really should be called the first English Civil War, but seems to have been inexplicably expunged from most accounts of British history.

With that in mind, I was aiming to come up with some metaphor related to that time about a Kenilworth nobleman coming to conquer Leicester. Unfortunately, the Earl of Warwick (about the closest person of any consequence) appears to have been comprehensively defeated by de Montford, and Warwick Castle captured, so perhaps the quality of my play is historically accurate after all. If anyone with better historical knowledge than me can come up with a more positive link, please do let me know and I shall steal it for future messages.

I think we can all agree these reports need something more upmarket that Mark’s usual popular songs, so instead I bring you the museum of the day from my cultural trip around Leicester. Official KCC museum review – average (but much better than the chess so far, from my perspective):