To enable players to get to grips with the ECF On-Line County Championships currently being launched (see updated notice here), a practice run (called “Preliminary”, though it has no qualifying status) was held on 06/06/2020. The Yorkshire team was paired against Norfolk. (Have these two counties met before?) As captain Daniel Sullivan put it: “A tough start!”

Norfolk had White on board 1.

	Grade	Norfolk	7-5	Yorkshire	Grade
1	219	Richard Polaczek	1@0	Andrew Ledger	226
2	210	Michael Harris	1-0	Robert Starley	193	play
3	209	Henry Duncanson	1-0	Peter Ackley	190	play
4	188	Stephen Orton	½‑½	Peter Gayson	189
5	186	Arasu Ganesan	½-½	Bernard Chan	187
6	184	Roy Hughes	½-½	Mate Ther	184	play
7	175	Daniel Frean	1-0	Dan Staples	174
8	174	Jeff Dawson	0-1	Douglas Vleeshhouwer	177	play
9	172	Mervyn Hughes	0-1	Pete Micklethwaite	176	play
10	164	Karthik Saravanan	0-1	David Wedge	170	play
11	160	Ben Sadler	1-0	James Carpenter	169
12	157	Steve Moore	½-½	Mark Allison	168
av.	183.2	(grades are ECF Jan. 2020 over-the-board)			183.6
Click on “play” to play through the game on screen /\|\

@ The pgn file for board 1 records the game as being abandoned at move 10. Maybe there was a problem such as loss of connection. So, the 1-0 score line may not be essentially a technical one

On board 2, Robert Starley steered a game which seemed to have drifted off course into an opposite-coloured bishop ending, but the weakness of his king-side pawns was too telling, and the Norfolk player induced resignation after 79 moves.

On board 3, the Peter Ackley slipped up while under attack, and allowed a winning combination.

On board 6, Mate Ther established a strong rook on the seventh, but his bishop was next to useless, and his king had no entry points, and the players ended up repeating moves with their kings, so drawing.

Yorkshire’s wins on boards 8 to 10 all involved elementary mistakes on the other side. One suspects that players unacquainted with on-line chess can find it difficult to get used to it. Presumably one is playing on a 2D diagram, which contrasts with the 3D image with parallax which a real chessboard provides.

Fortunately this loss does not “count”. The captain’s post-match report to players was as follows:

A big thank you to everyone who played in the warm up.

I know that there were some technical difficulties - some people had problems issuing challenges, internet connection issues and the email address in the rules to send results to is wrong (controller.counties@englishchess.org.uk - not co.uk as in the rules on page six).

However, I hope that everyone enjoyed their games.

We have a match next Saturday at 6.30pm. I'll be in touch tomorrow to see who is ready for round one.

Best wishes

Daniel

The full list of pairings (and results when to hand) was as follows:

	OPEN	(21 teams)
Northumberland	7-7	Middlesex A
Norfolk	7-5	Yorkshire
Essex	7½-3½	Devon
Cheshire & N. Wales	10-2	Beds. & Herts.
Gloucestershire	8½‑3½	Worcestershire
Oxfordshire	0-0	Shropshire
Berkshire	3½-8½	Cumbria
Hampshire	5-4	Warwickshire
Derbyshire	½-8½	Somerset
Greater Manchester	1½*6½	Surrey
Surrey	2½*1½	Leicestershire
Leicestershire	2*1	Greater Manchester
* triangular match

	U1825	(7 teams)
Surrey	6½-5½	Norfolk
Oxfordshire	4-10	Northumberland
Leicestershire	1½-6½
Essex	2-1	(2/3 triangular)
Middlesex	2-2

Odd numbers of teams necessitated two “triangular” matches. Lincolnshire was originally listed as though they had entered, so maybe they have dropped out, but they may simply have not been fully ready at this stage.

Detailed results of the above matches (which are in effect “friendlies”) are on ECF LMS system. The composition of teams shows that enthusiasm for on-line chess is limited, so that teams are nowhere near as strong as o-t-b teams from the counties involved.