Tag: Camberley

Club Blitz Championship 2025

Last Thursday at the club we held our annual blitz championship. An 8-round showdown with levels from local patzer to FIDE Master. The night was filled with upsets, an early champion, some great chess and in standard blitz fashion, lots of flagging.

Previous joint-champions Daniel Seaton and Colin Purdon were both in attendance, with Daniel resigning himself to giving up the title before the games even began! The field was much stronger than last year, as members FM Jon Ady, Simon Knight and Adrian Wallace were new joiners this year, bringing up the average rating significantly.

Daniel runs through the tournament results – his last chance to clutch the trophy before having to hand it over.

The Champion

A huge congratulations to Simon Knight, who won the tournament before the start of the last round! Two points clear heading into round 8, Simon held a performance of 7/7 with six wins and one full-point bye at that point. Sadly he was to face FM Jon Ady in the final round and suffered a loss, ending on 7/8. Nevertheless, Simon takes the title from last year’s joint-champions Daniel and Colin with a championship-worthy performance.

Simon had joined the club for the first time that week to participate, and we are incredibly happy to welcome him for our summer of tournaments and championships. I suspect the time at our casual Sunday afternoons at Pine Ridge Golf Club had given Simon all the inside information needed to cut through the competition and earn the title! Well played, and we hope to see you at more of our events in the future.

Out with the old, in with the new: Winner and Club Blitz Champion Simon Knight holding the trophy, while Daniel covers his defeat with a smile.

Blitz is always a roll of the dice. In 3+2 time control over the board, even the best players may stop and think for a second too long, and get into time trouble. For this reason, blitz events are always a mixed bag of expected results, and unexpected upsets. Here are the full standings after round 8:

For the full results, please visit the ChessResults page.

After unluckily flagging in a round 2 matchup against Steve Harley, winner of last year’s Open Blitz FM Jon Ady warned me you must not “fall in love with the position” – Going to show that even master-level players may think for a moment too long and suffer the consequences.

Warren Wright took down A-team legend Tim Mowlem in round 6, and ended on a respectable 4/8 with a high performance rating a few hundred points over his current rating! Warren’s style of all-out attack is seems very well suited to the blitz time control, well played Warren.

The Club Blitz started the 2025 summer cirucit of events with a bang, and I for one am looking forward to the next tournament!

Maybe I may even win one… one can only hope.

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Match Report – Rapid A team take on Fleet & Farnborough

Report from Camberley A v Fleet & Farnborough A – 24th March 2025

The lineups for this match looked as they typically do for Camberley, with a team consisting of Martin on board one, Colin two, Paul on three and Tim on four. On any other day this would be a strong team eyeing the victory. However for the second time this season we faced GM Simon K Williams on board one, and 2200-rated Blair Connell on board two.

So to get the standard report out of the way, the match ended 5.5-2.5 to Fleet & Farnborough. It was a tough match, with the first round of games ending with a loss on board one & two, and draws on boards three & four.

The already dim hopes of the winning were doing little to dampen spirits in the second round, coming out guns-blazing, channelling Han Solo’s “never tell me the odds” line.

The second round saw Tim play his trusty London System on board four, taking home a win after his opponent made a critical error coming out of the opening. Both Paul and Colin met similar fates ending up with losses in their second games.

With one game left, and the match already being won for Fleet & Farnborough, eveyone emptied out of the room heading for the bar in typical fashion, already predicting another loss on board one.

Those paying particular attention to the score at this point may slowly come to the revelation of what must have happened on board one…

Simon and Martin having a post-mortem on the game.

“Against All Odds” – Martin “Stone” Wallman

After dubbing himself before the match a sacrifical lamb to board one’s GM Simon K Williams, Martin had done the unthinkable.

The game started with Martin playing a Scandinavian, certainly a brave opening considering his opponent. As the game progressed into a tricky middlegame, material was even… You would think Martin was down a queen if all you listened to were the opinions of everyone in the bar.

General consensus in the bar was that this was heading for a Martin defeat, simply due to the 659-point rating difference

Despite the match already being lost and thoughts of his previous double-defeat at the hands of Simon, Martin persisted into an endgame which, with perfect play, was a draw. To even get to this point against such a formidable opponent was enough to go home happy, but Martin wasn’t letting go that easy.

A Draw!

You should have seen the captain’s reaction! Martin had successfully defended a same-coloured bishop ending, where any small mistake would end in disaster. With Simon setting tactical trap after trap, Martin navigated the endgame perfectly – both with under 3 minutes on the clock!

After a long time shuffling Simon realised Martin “Stone” Wallman was not going to break down, and accepted a draw offer.

The full game is below, annotated by Martin, and on our Games Page, as well as our Hall Of Games study on lichess. The game goes up until the endgame, where you can see the drawn position. The game went on for many unrecorded moves after that of deadlock and solid defending before the draw was finally agreed.

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