Bedford at the British!

Three quarters of the Cox’s and Paul Habershon have entered the British Championships at Torquay this year.

David lost his first game in the under-120 section. Toby and Lucian both have 1/2 in the under 14’s and 12’s respectively.

You can follow the Championships here but we are also lucky again to have some regular insights from Paul ….

“So here I am again, another year older but no wiser. I arrived on Ftiday and played unsuccessfully in the 5-round weekender: WLLDD for 2/5. It was either to exhaust myself or warm up for the Seniors. I am rated 16th of 50 players. Top seed is Danny Wright making a long delayed debut in the O-65s. Few of you are old enough to remember him from the 1960s when he won the Hastings Challengers and qualified to play in the following year’s elite 10-player Premier. However, in the usual top half v bottom half first round he only drew with Philip Stimpson, so I am temporarily ahead of him after a rather fortunate win v Colin Ramage. As you will see in the notes to the attached game I thought I had played well, but Fritz soon put me right afterwards. My opponent missed a win and then a draw.

There was an incident with the Rd 2 pairings this evening. I happened to be in a Chinese restaurant with Adrian Elwin, Stewart Reuben and others when Adrian decided to look up the pairings on his phone. Reuben was on Board 3 with one point but he had lost his first round game! Mild panic from the Director of Home Chess. All he could do was phone the relevant arbiter, but we decided the rule is that the pairings cannot be changed once published. We don’t yet know if the players wrote the wrong result on their scoresheets.” – Paul