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Our annual AGM was held at The Royal British Legion's branch in Truro on Monday the 20th of June 2011. The attendees were Ian George, Robin Kneebone, Anton Barkhuysen, Cristopher Reeves, Jeremy Menadue, Mark Hassall, Don King, Richard Nancarrow, Ian Lewis, Simon Bartlett, Sheila Cooke, David Jenkins, Richard Smith, Peter Greenwood, Ian Renshaw and myself.
The various officers presented their reports. When the election of officers item came up the status quo was preserved.
Ian George proposed a motion that the rules governing player eligibility be amended to "Rule 3 of the Rules applicable to all matches to be deleted and the remaining rules re-numbered accordingly." The following clause to be added to Rule 2 of the League rules:"Eligibility of Players"
a) A player may not play for more than one club simultaneously in the same competition.
b) A player wishing to transfer to another club may do so by informing the league secretary accordingly. Thereafter during that season s/he may not play for any other club in that competition." The following clause is to be added to Rule 6 of the Rules governing knock-out competitions: "A player may not play for more than one club simultaneously in the same competition." This has been sanctioned and will be implemented.
A motion proposed by Ian Lewis that the Under 135 Cup be renamed The Roger Grime Cup (or Trophy) was universally approved by everyone present and unananimously carried.
Fees for the next season were discussed and some modifications agreed upon that will be implemented this season.
Results & League Tables for 2010/11
Premier Division Premier table Premier
results
Minor Division
Minor table
Minor
results
The Final Placings In The Leagues For 2010/11
Truro have won The County Shield very comfortably this season and are the Division 1 champions. Camborne are runners-up. Truro have also carried off The Busby Cup for this season!
Falmouth are the winners of the Roberts Cup Under 164 Event, and Falmouth have also won the Under 135 trophy, drawing the final wih Newquay
but gaining the trophy on board elimination.
An outstanding season of achievement for Truro and Falmouth.
The Annual County Championships
The Cornwall congress was held at Stithians over the weekend of March 25th-27th.
The Emigrant Cup was won by Robin Kneebone (Truro). Coming into the last round an in-form Lloyd Retallick (Newquay), having beaten the no. 1 seed, Jeremy Menadue (Truro), in a fine game, led by half a point so he needed a draw and Robin needed to win with black. Robin played the Modern Benoni and prevailed in a tactical game. A fine performance and much overdue success for our president.
At my prompting Robin was kind enough to submit the score of his climactic game that decided the championship for this year. The score is in ChessBase format so ideally you need to have that program on your computer to play through this game but it is possible that it might play successfully in other software too. All you can do is try. Here it is complete with Robin's own comments: L. Retallick v. R. Kneebone A handy little reader program that allows you to open ChessBase files can be downloaded here. (Just click on the link to the free ChessBase reader and download and install it.)
The Falmouth Cup was won by David R. Jenkins of Polruan, also a fine performance by a newcomer to Cornish chess this season. Going into the final round Mick Hill was a half-point ahead of his chasing pack and looked likely to win overall but fell at the last hurdle. It was necessary to invoke the second tie-break criterion (sum of opponent's scores) to declare David Jenkins the official trophy holder over Chris Reeves (Truro)
and myself (Liskeard).
This year's results are presented below together with last year's to facilitate making comparisons.
The Emigrant Cup 2011
The Falmouth Cup 2011
The Emigrant Cup 2010
The Falmouth Cup 2010
The Somerset-Cornwall County Match
This took place against Somerset on March the 12th at our usual playing venue in Exminster. It was played over 14 boards rather than the usual 16. Objectively we took quite a drubbing but the Somerset team captain pointed out to me that considering the differential in the gradings of the two teams Cornwall would only have been expected to rack up a score of three or perhaps three and a half points so we performed better than expected! I hope that hearing that leaves all of our players who lost feeling better! A document showing the individual results may be found here.
The Cornwall vs. Gloucestershire County Match
Played in Exminster on the 16th of October this match was drawn 6-all. Both teams had difficulty mustering the usual quota of 16 players each to play one of these matches so it was decided to compromise with a 12-board match. A PDF document prepared by Ian George showing the individual results may be found here.
The Applicable Gradings Limits
The new gradings for this season have been released by Ian and are downloadable by clicking on the link at the very top. May I remind everybody that because of the revised way the gradings are now done, old gradings limits that used to apply to some events are no longer applicable and have been 'upfloated' to reflect everybody's generally higher gradings. The pertinent new limits are: 164 or below to be eligible to play in the Minor League,
145 or below to be eligible to play in the Falmouth
Cup,
135 or below to be eligible to play in the Under 135, (formerly the Under 115 Cup) and
106 or under to be eligible to play in the Penwith Cup.
The 2009/10 AGM
Our annual AGM was held at The Royal British Legion's branch in Truro on Thursday the 10th of June 2010. The attendees were Ian George, Robin Kneebone, Anton Barkhuysen, Cristopher Reeves, Mike Middleton, Jeremy Menadue, Mark Hassall, Don King, Stephen Fanning, (and his wife), Colin Sellwood, Richard Nancarrow, Ian Lewis, Colin Gardiner, Mick Ferrie, Gerald Crouch, Ian Renshaw and myself. Apologies for non-attendance were sent by Simon Bartlett and Philip Williams.
The various officers presented their reports. When the election of officers item came up for consideration the status quo was largely preserved with the only noteworthy change being that I have now relinquished the League Secretary's job and this has reverted back to Ian George who has been a popular and efficient discharger of the office in the past.
A motion proposed by myself that one of the rules that we play by - "Teams must be arranged in current playing strength" should be altered to "Teams must be arranged in current grading order" was considered by the gathering and voted upon. It was pretty well 50/50 and the deciding vote was cast by President Robin Kneebone who favoured perpetuating the status quo. So the wording remains as it is and no changes will be written to this rule; but extra guidelines have been circulated to the clubs by Ian George.
Next, Ian George's motion that
"Any member dissatisfied with a decision made by an officer or organisaion in accordance with clause 2.04 may appeal in writing to the President who shall take one of the following actions:
a) Reject the appeal,
b)Appoint an independent member or instruct the secretary to convene a meeting of the Executive Sub-committee to investigate the circumstances of and issue a ruling on the appeal.
Any decision made in accordance with a) or b) above shall be definitive and binding on all parties."
was voted upon. It was unanimously approved.
This year's Secretaries Meeting
A precis of this prepared by indefatigable Ian George may be read here.
Results Update
In The Busby Cup Truro narrowly prevailed over Newquay in the final winning the title on board count. Congratulations to Truro.
The Somerset vs. Cornwall County Match
In the match that took place between Somerset and Cornwall at
Exminster Centre on Saturday the 18th of March 2010, Somerset ran out
as very comfortable winners. The fixtures and individual results
can be found here.
Kudos to Anton Barkhuysen, Colin Sellwood and Robin Kneebone all of whom managed to win their games for us.
Musings
In exploring my own copy of ChessBase it dawned on me that I've hardly used the substantial database of recent games (that are automatically included and copied to your hard drive when you install the program) in a very long time. Although compendious I would imagine that not very many casual players make much use of it either; after all, who's going to be seriously interested in studying the games of rank and file players when you can download worthwhile databases of world-class players for free? So I went off in search of online collections of celebrated players and found a real treasure trove! I was so much more impressed with the calibre of these games that I've now deleted the database that came as part of the package and replaced it with thirteen individual databases each featuring the games of a renowned player. You can locate the exact treasure trove that I found at this URL.
Download whatever turns you on.
Obviously, this site is interested in promulgating its own proprietary program for handling pgn files - Pgn Mentor as they call it - and this does look like a good program which might be easier on many chessplayers pockets than the more monolithic ChessBase.
The Devon versus Cornwall County Match
In the match that took place between Devon and Cornwall at the
Liskerret Centre on Saturday the 5th of December, not altogether
surprisingly Devon ran out as the comfortable winners. They've
outgraded us heavily for years and Cornwall generally feel that
they've done well if they manage to win just a couple of games.
That was the case this time too with only Jeremy Menadue on Board
1 and Robin Kneebone on Board 5 playing well enough to win their
games. We drew 6, defaulted on 2 and lost the rest! The fixtures
and individual results can be found here.
The Kerrier Cup for 2009/10 Results
Robin Kneebone has been officially adjudged the winner of this
event.
The Revised Grading System
An
explanation of how the gradings are computed.
Quite a
useful resource for those who are curious about these matters and
would like a simple way to find
out more about a particular
player (opponent?) is: I
know all about you! where you just enter in the name
of the
individual you're curious about, hit 'enter' and away you go!
Association and Clubs
Officers,
Organisers & The Official Rules
Names, addresses, phone
numbers/email addresses
and the Rules that we play by.
Clubs
Short details of each club with a link to its own page.
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Our Chess Archives |
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Web Site Update
This site is gradually being updated. Until this is complete,
you will find that some links currently do not work. In some
cases, where you have clicked a link to a page that has not been
created yet, you will get an error message and will need to use
your back button to return to the page you came from. Only 5% of
the links on this site are problematic. These are gradually being
repaired!
If you would prefer a different text size onscreen as you're
reading this then you have a couple of options: one is you could
avail yourself of the facility built in to virtually all modern
browsers for changing the font size. In both Internet Explorer and
Firefox click on the 'View' menu and then select 'text size' and
choose the option you want. (In IE you have to close the browser
and then re-open it to see the change.) If you're using Google's
rather neat Chrome browser then instructions on how to change the
default font size can be found here.
The other is, you could try using a different browser or another version of your browser
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Contact Me
I hope that all visitors to this
site will find something of interest to them. If you have any
comments, suggestions or anything to say about chess in Cornwall,
please send an email to Gary
Trudeau
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