Welcome back to the Chess Club this year, and I hope everyone is doing well. This year has not been a normal one, and the chess club has been affected like everything else. We’d like to share our plans for the coming year.
Firstly, the Bristol and District League has been postpone indefinitely, which will come as a surprise to no one. BUCA is also likely to not go ahead in 2021, although this has not been confirmed. Much of the competitive chess scene has moved online with no view for over-the-board chess until 2021 at the earliest.
To compensate for the loss of the league fixtures, we are planning matches and tournaments against other university chess clubs. The first of these will be the Online Uni Chess League for which we have entered two teams. The matches will be fortnightly on chess.com starting at 7pm this Sunday with a time control of 10+5. Please contact Conor Newton, cn15588@bristol.ac.uk, if you are interested.
We will also be running an internal league within the club on Lichess.org each term. If you are interested please join our team on Lichess, Bristol University, and we will give more information closer to the time.
We are also planning online social events, the first of which will be Give it a Go events, aimed at players new to the club, the first of which will be tomorrow at 5pm. We will be running a friendly 5+5 tournament on Lichess and have a zoom meeting for any new players to ask questions and have a chat.
We have space booked in the SU building for socials on Thursdays from 6-7:45pm in the Gromit room (4th floor). When the SU building opens from 12th October, we will run socials based on demand. The limit for this room is 11 people, so we will allow people to book spaces ahead of time in the socials on a first-come first-served basis. We will give more details closer to the date.
I hope everyone has a great year, and I look forward to seeing you all.
Stay safe
Alex Vaughan, President