Phil was a stalwart of Olton, playing Board 1 for many, many years and was an absolute giant of the Leamington League - winning the League Blitz tournament, for instance, 14 times between 1996 and 2019, and leading Olton to 18 league titles. He died tragically early at the age of just 52 in 2022 and the first memorial event was held the following summer, when we fielded 2 teams but didn't really trouble the leader board as Halesowen ran out winners. We weren't invited back in either 2024 or 2025, but this year we were there to take part in a 3 round all play all rapid event of 15' + 10 secs.
I managed to get a strong team together of people who were long standing friends of Phil, and my biggest problem was sorting out the board order, given there were just a handful of rating points between all 4 of us. In the end I chose to use chess activity as the determinant, so we lined up with Bruce on Board 1, me on 2, Andrew on 3 and Andy on 4. I rejected a suggestion by Andrew to order the team by handsome-ness, as that could only have led to large-scale civil war!
In round 1 we kicked off against Olton, who included 3 of their regular 4 LDCL A team, but we were in pretty imperious form and scored a 3.5-0.5 win, with onlyAndrew dropping a half point, though I gather he was winning earlier in the game, so it could easily have been 4-0. Which was the score we followed up with in each of the next 2 rounds against, first, South Birmingham and then Halesowen. The final round encounter on Board 1 between Stewart Fishburne and Bruce was very much in the spirit - if not the accuracy - of Phil's style of play and I'm sure he would have found it massively amusing. Stewart, with White, threw the kitchen sink at Bruce's king, but it was his own king that wound up the more exposed and it was eventually mated on h4 after a vicious counter-attack. This was unquestionably the game of the night from what I saw.
So, the final scores were:-
1 Kenilworth 11.5/12
2=Olton and Halesowen 4.5/12
4 South Birmingham 3.5/12
Our prize, apart from a very nice trophy, was to have the "privilege" of organising the 2027 event!
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| Mark Page, whose selection and board order policies were totally vindicated by the results, receives the Phil Holt Memorial Trophy from Rob Reynolds of Olton. |
Its been a long time since we had any music, so let's rectify that right now!
Great song. Not sure about the Confederate flags, though!
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