Special Rockhammer Rapidplay Tournament evening Monday 4th October


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On Monday 4th October  we are organising a special Rockhammer evening:

  • There will be Three rounds (7:15pm, 8:15pm, 9:15pm), or fewer if anyone wants to arrive late or leave early
  • 25+10 time control
  • Entrants must be ECF-registered
  • Pairings done on the night
  • All games will count towards your ECF rapid grading and also towards the Rockhammer internal tournament results and standings.

I would like to take this opportunity to remind the members about the internal tournaments our club offers. Besides the Blitz tournaments organised from time to time in the club evenings, we have three longer play handicap tournament cups organised all year long:

Sledgehammer Cup: Standard play (typically 60’+30’’)
Rockhammer Cup: Rapidplay (typically 30’+15’’)
Jackhammer 960: Fischer Random Chess Rapidplay (960 games are not ECF graded)

Those are very flexible tournaments where the players can agree a time and place of their choice, whether on club night or elsewhere and play games counting towards the tournament, both in OTB or Online formats.

Beside being ECF graded games (online games are graded separately), the internal tournament points are based on a handicap system, so everyone has a good chance to mark points in the tournament and finish at the top of the standings, the participation in those tournaments is rewarded.

Currently, we have great conditions to develop those internal tournaments, with the return of OTB chess, the move to our fantastic new location in the Mind Sports Centre and many new members joining the club, this is the perfect opportunity to participate in those cups.

You can play two games in each cup against every member of the club, one with White pieces and one with Black pieces. This makes potentially 6 official games of chess with each member of the club during the year, ECF graded (except 960 games). With 120 members in the club, you can possibly  play 720 official rated games  of chess within one season, flexibly whenever and wherever you agree to play! This is a lot of training! Besides, there is no better way to improve at chess than sitting with your opponent and going through the games when you finish, and finding out about the good and the bad moves you made.

To make the communication easier, and to find opponents easily for those tournaments, we have created a WhatsApp group dedicated to these tournaments where we publish the standings on a regular basis, and where members can call for opponents who would like to play. If you are interested, just ask Adam to add your number to the group chat. ( ‘Hammer Tournaments’ WhatsApp group).

Once you play your games, all you need to do is to post the result on a Google Forms link (given below) and we will register the game for the results and for ECF grading after checking that everything is in order.

A few resources:

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