Month: September 2022

On Monday 3rd October we’re delighted to welcome club member Tallulah Roberts – Lula – to the Mindsports Centre.

Lula only started playing chess during lockdown in December 2020 and began her journey as a streamer in February 2021. Since then she has become a successful streamer for Chess.com and played top board for the first ever Jersey Women’s team at the Olympiad in Chennai, India in August this year.

Known also as the ‘meme Queen’ on Twitter and Instagram, Lula will be giving a lecture on Highlights from her Chennai Olympiad experience.

The lecture will run from about 7.30 pm – 8.30 pm, with questions from the audience encouraged. Afterwards, Lula will stay for an evening of casual chess and blitz.

You can find Lula online at:

www.twitch.tv/lularobs
www.instagram.com/lularobs
www.twitter.com/lularobs

The event is free to all Hammer members and instructions for joining the club or renewing your membership are available on our website.

Return of the Sledgehammer and  Rockhammer Tournaments for 2022/23

Hammersmith Chess Club will continue offering year-long ECF-graded internal tournaments to its members.

We would like those tournaments to be as flexible as possible. Therefore members are still encouraged to contact other club members and organise their own OTB games. This will encourage members to meet each other and play serious rated games at the time and place of their convenience. With more than 200 players in the club, you could play a very large number of rated games during the year both in standard and rapidplay. We have a specially dedicated Whatsapp group for those tournaments where we publish the results and standings regularly and you are encouraged to come forward on this channel to contact other players and organise your games.

Additionally, the club secretariat will continue organising Sledgehammer and Rockhammer special club nights, and in those special events players will be paired to play a game or two during the night. This year the first special Rockhammer night will be organised on Monday 19th September, and we hope many players will participate.

 

This year we will have two different Cups:

• The Sledgehammer Cup for Standard Play
• The Rockhammer Cup for Rapid Play

Those tournaments are open to all Hammersmith Chess Club members. All you need to do is to contact your fellow club members, agree on an appointment for an OTB game, and then submit the game result via this link to the game submission form.

Please note that

• This year those tournaments will be OTB only.
• All OTB games are ECF-graded, online games will not count towards the tournament this year.
• Players must be ECF-registered to play OTB games.
• Game results will only be accepted via the provided game submission form, results by email will not be accepted.
• This year we will not have a cup dedicated to 960 Fischer Random Chess, but there will still be events organised around this format from time to time.

For complete information and rules, please have a look at the Hammer Tournaments Documentation

Good luck with the 2022/23 Hammer Tournaments Season!

The Internal Tournaments Team

Dear Hammers,

The new season is approaching fast, it is back-to-school time. No doubt you are full of confidence after your summer training. One way to improve is to work hard on your chess. Another way for easy, additional Elo boost is the AMAZING HAMMER MERCH (results may vary).

Let’s strike fear in the hearts of our competitors by showing up at the board with our fantastic t-shirt, featuring the amazing logo design of the incredibly talented graphic designer Hammer Matt Perchard.  Link to the web store: 

https://hammersmith-chess-club.creator-spring.com/

Grab a mug and an adult or junior t-shirt now – for a fraction of the cost of a three lions shirt!

The store is run at a small profit which goes straight to the club budget. 

By the way, for our members, please check your inboxes for the kind email reminder to renew your club subscription. 

Benji

Here at Hammer HQ we’re excited to announce a new initiative: Opening of the Month!

Each month of the chess season will be devoted to a separate opening: with that month including lectures, themed tournaments, and high level analysis of members’ games played in that opening.

September’s opening of choice will be the Sicilian Defense!

This Monday 5th September, Christof Brixel will be giving an introductory lecture to the opening. This will be followed by a Sicilian-themed tournament, where every game must begin 1.e4 c5.

If you’re unsure about whether to attend, here’s a quick pitch from Christof himself!

New to the Sicilian? Confused between the Dragon, the Accelerated Dragon and the Hyper-Accelerated Dragon, the English Attack and the Grand-Prix Attack? We provide a brief guidance. Not so much how to play but what you can play, what suits your style. We structure the Sicilian jungle into systems for the more tactical, the more positional and the flexible players. It gives a map for further study at home. There is endless free material on the internet, but you have to know what you are looking for.

The exact openings schedule for the rest of the year is still being discussed. Please get in touch if you want to throw your favourite line into the hat!

Junior Hour Returns!

The start of the school year marks the first junior hour of the season. The junior subcommittee have been hard at work to put together a structured, educational and fun programme.

I look forward to seeing lots of juniors at 6pm, and plenty more for Christof’s lecture at 7:30pm!

Adam