This weekend has seen the 3rd Crewe Congress take place in style at the Crewe Ibis Hotel with a 28% increase in entries from last year, making a total of 141 as the organisers went shopping for more tables on Friday. Equipment supplier, Chess Essentials was evicted from his intended room and moved to the Hotel Foyer in order to accomodate the flood of last minute applications to play, and unfortunately we even had to decline some latecomers.
The Congress has been another roaring success thanks to the hard work put in by the Congress Committee especially organiser Neville Layhe, with Les Hall and David Price from the club, together with the Arbiter Matthew Carr.
Many thanks go to all the players who travelled the length and breadth of the country to join us, from places a far as the Isle of Man, Scotland and London to name but three.
From our own club’s point of view we had great interest with nearly 50% of our members competing and taking up 13 places. The stand out performances came from the two section winners, both scoring a perfect 5/5 as Karl Lockett graded only 149 romped away with the Major Section (U165), and 15 year old Harry Gardiner justified his number 1 seeding in the Minor Section (U105).
There were other notable scores as organiser Neville Layhe finished joint second in the Major with an unbeaten 3.5/5; junior Lukasz Michalek picked up the grading prize in the Minor with the same score as Neville. Other players scoring over 50% were Adam Fields and Philip Wright scoring 3/5 in the Minor, while Dave Price’s 3.5 in the Intermediate section (U135) left him just outside the prizes in joint4th.
Full results can be seen from the Congress Results section of the website.