Month: September 2017

Rick Renegade surged to the top of the table with two further wins on Wednesday night to take his point tally to 13.5pts from 17 games, to overtake long term leader Neville Layhe who got stuck on 12.5 pts from 18. Finishing 3rd was highest percentage scorer Martin Gill with 11/12.

An overall number of 23 members participated in this year’s event which bodes well for the future of our club.

In other news the C team started their division 4 campaign with a comfortable win in the derby against our D team. Wins for Doug Barnett, Chris Rhodes and Amy Lovatt were more than enough to secure the points as captain Dave Price was held to a draw by Martin Gill to avoid a whitewash for the Ds.

Next week sees another derby with E vs F in division 5, while the “A” team travel to Cheddleton to start their division 2 season.

 

With just one week to go in the club’s summer Rapid-play the book-makers are having a headache as long term leader Neville Layhe is being reeled in.

Neville has run out of opponents while sitting in pole position with 12.5/18. In 2nd spot is Rick Renegade with 11.5/15 but has the difficulty of finding an opponent while many are on holiday or will be tied up playing the first NSDCA league match of the season. In 3rd place is outsider Martin Gill with the outstanding score of 11/12 who is scheduled to play in the D vs C team “derby” and is probably now regretting missing one or two club nights earlier in the summer.

Good luck to these three in the final week. The full table can be seen from the links on the right hand side of the website’s home page.

The club had several members playing at Leek over this last weekend in the Staffordshire Congress. Doug was accompanied by Rick Renegade in the major section, while Les Hall, Martin Gill and Phil Wright played in the Minor tourney.

Doug was our star performer finishing unbeaten with 4/5 to share 1st prize with Jon Blackburn Snr (the popular Cheddleton player) while Rick could only muster 1.5 pts from his 5 rounds although facing the two highest graded players in the section.

Martin was our best scorer in the Minor section with 3.5 pts to finish just outside the prize money in joint 4th. Les did very well to finish with 3/5 and Phil scored a creditable 2 pts as well.

The club kicked off the new league season with a lucky win in the Wirral League Division 2 match vs Pensby (last Tuesday 12th Sept). It was a case of ” black magic” as all players won their games with black pieces to produce a narrow 3-2 win for us. The opposition were much weaker than normal without their regular top board and fielding two players below grade 100 on the bottom boards, giving us an advantage of 140 grading pts over the 5 boards. Unexpectedly we trailed twice with wins by Martin Gill and Ola Titiloye leveling the score on both occasions. It was left to skipper David Hulme to clinch the match with a huge slice of luck as his opponent lost on time in a tricky position when failing to make the 35 move time control with a piece down, only for one of Pensby’s spectators to point out there was a forced mate imminent which would have given them victory.

The Summer Rapid-play tournament saw another dozen or so games played last night, with the latest table appearing on the right hand side of the website under the Teams header.

Neville Layhe continues to lead the tourney but is running out of opponents to play having amassed 10.5 pts from 16 games so far. His nearest rival is Rick Renegade who trails by 2 pts having played 4 games less (with 1 point awarded for a win). Just behind Rick in 3rd place is Martin Gill who was runner up in the 2016 event and is making a late surge in the competition. Mart has the much higher percentage with 8/9, but needs to overhaul the points scored by the players ahead.

The challenge in the final three weeks will be to arrange games to give themselves the best chance of winning the Rapid-play trophy, as the competition closes on 27th September and with the winter league matches starting next week.

So far 21 members have entered the competition and 64 games have been played which shows the commitment made by Neville to have played 16 of them !

The first Wirral League match takes place on Tuesday, with Crewe hosting Pensby 1 in a Division 2 fixture at Chester, where all our home matches in the Wirral League are played.

All of the clubs fixtures are shown in date order under the Fixtures 2017/18 tab, while each of our team’s fixtures are sorted on the right hand side under the Teams header.