Oswestry Chess Club
Oswestry Chess Club, in the face of rising charges at Oswestry Senior Citizens Club, has decided to move to Morda and Sweeney village hall. We will meet every Wednesday starting on August 13 and continuing till May 20, apart from Christmas Eve and New Years Eve. We have one more night at the Senior Citizens club, probably May 22 but that's not definite yet. Having a long break in summer is a shame but the trade off is that we meet every week from mid August to mid May, and meeting 39 weeks of the year is as much, and possibly more, than we can afford.
Oswestry B, in their final match of the season, triumphed over Division 2 leaders Newport Junior A with a 3-2 away win. There is one more match to play in the Division between Maddocks B and Church Stretton A, but the result of this match will not affect Oswestry B's position in the table. Despite their fine victory, Oswestry B finish in last place.
Oswestry B's last match of the season is against top-of-the-table Newport Junior A. An Oswestry victory seems unlikely, so the B team will probably finish bottom of Division 2 with just a single win to their name — they beat Maddocks B 3-2 on the 17th April.
Richard Bryant is victorious once again as Club Champion, with an unbeaten 5/5 score. There are two or three games that have yet to be played, but Richard is an unassailable victor. You never know, but Richard might even be awarded an actual trophy this year — he deserves it. His victory prize last year was merely a round of enthusiastic applause.
In their last game of the season, Oswestry A won with a resounding 3½ - 1½ win over Telford A, even though they were a player short on Board 5. Oswestry A now lie third in Division 1, althought the Shrewsbury and Newport A teams still have a match in hand.
Oswestry Chess Club's Alex Loe achieved joint second place in the Under 18 section of the 2025 Shropshire Junior Championship with a score of 4/6. Well done Alex.
Oswestry B scored a fine 3-2 win over Maddocks B in the penultimate match of the season, and have now doubled their season's points total to 4. Unfortunately, they are still hanging on in last place in Division Two. One more game, one more win perhaps?
We have now doubled the number of members' articles on the heavily populated Articles page from one to two. Does anybody else fancy contributing? There must be a plethora of topics that members would find interesting, so perhaps some brave soul could peck away at those keys and grind out a few sentences. You might even find that you enjoy it.
See the Club Calendar page for the latest Club Night Dates. There will be a special Club Night on Wednesday 30th April at Morda Village Hall to try the place out as an alternative venue to the Senior Citizens Club. Members are urged to attend in order to gauge feelings about a possible move. The matter will be discussed at the Club Night on May 8th back at the Senior Citizens and a decision made.
After an Extrodinary General Meeting on 14th March, Shropshire Chess have decided to put the online league out of its misery. Division 1, where most of the problems occur, has been immediately axed while Division 2 will exist only until the end of the season. The Online League pages will therefore be removed from our website with immediate effect, thus saving a lot of digital labour. Whoopee.
Well, there has been no movement at all for the A team since October of last year. They have been stuck in the middle of Division 1 at 4th out of seven for the last six matches. The B team likewise show no evidence of progress — they are dangling off the bottom of Division 2, their customary place for the whole of the season. There may not even be a B team next season. Jon is bowing out as team captain and unless some other brave soul steps forward to take up the reins it is kaput for the dangling Bs.
At the completion of Round 4, the points position is
We have three new entrants joining the Club Championship battle — Stephen Read, Sam Fowkes and Martyn Smith. Martyn was a regular at the club but we haven't seen him for quite a while. Good luck chaps. Stephen and Sam are both recent members.
Round 3 has been contested and the standings so far are:
The online Division 1 match results have not been updated on the Shropshire Chess website since 10th October 2024 with the exception of one match between Shropshire & Friends 2 and Shropshire & Friends 1 on 30th January 2025. I believe, though I am not sure, that team captains are responsible for reporting match results. In light of this I might as well drop the online league pages and save myself the work of updating them (Al, the digital drone). To be fair, the Division 2 pages are updated regularly.
A somewhat tardy announcement to let you know that Oswestry B played Newport Junior A on 28th January. Technically, this was a home match for the Oswestry team but becuase Newport were fielding youngsters in their side Oswestry were obliged to play the match in Newport — an 80 mile round trip to play a home game. An interesting concept. Anyway, Oswestry B lost 2-3, and as is their wont, they languish at the bottom of Division 2. Details as usual on the relevant page.
Oswestry A kicked off their 2025 activities on Thursday 16th Jan with a draw against Maddocks A, and now lie fourth out of seven in Division 1. Details on the OTB League: Oswestry A page.
A fair attendence on Thursday 9th of January given the icy conditions on the night. Two serious games were in progress — a round 3 Club Championship game featuring Julie and Marcus (which can be found on the Club Championship page), and a game in the County Individual Championship between Rudy and Chris Lewis of Newport. A new youngster, accompanied by her mother and hopefully a new member-to-be, was busy battling Jon in what looked like a rather one-sided game while Al beat Dave and was in turn taken out twice by Phil in a couple of games marked by horrific blunders by both players. Dave meanwhile took on Paul while Adrian played against another newcomer. Not a memorable night, but a cosily friendly couple of hours punctuating the frozen January darkness.
An unfortunate error by a certain member of the editorial staff (naming no names) in yesterday's post (see below) led to the Darwinian Knights A team being credited with a decisive 3 - 1 win over Oswestry A in round one of the Cox Trophy competition. This has now been corrected to the correct 2 - 2 result. It turns out that the Darwinian Knights were fighting in tin-plate armour with blunt weapons.
The Shropshire Chess Cox Trophy competition is underway for the OTB League Division 1 teams. Oswestry A had a poor first round, paired as they were against the polished armour and keen-pointed lances of the Darwinian Knights A team, finishing 1 - 3. The games are all available to view and download on the new Cox Trophy page.
All the pairings for Round 3 of the Championship are now up for viewing on the Club Championsip page.
The second round of the Club Championship has now concluded with Richard, Rudy and Gary boasting 2 points, Alex with an exclusive 1½ points, Adrian, Julie, Peter, Marcus, Paul C., Paul S. and Dave jostling together on 1 point, Keith, Alf and Jon huddling togething for warmth with ½ point each and Phil and Al dangling below with magnificent zeroes. Unfortunately, Phil and Dave have had to retire from proceedings because of a lack of ECF membership. See Oswestry Chess Club hit with ECF fine below for the full details. A start was been made on Round 3 at Club night on the 28th when the four bottom feeders, namely Jon, Keith, Alf and Al, traded blows. See the Club Championship page for games and standings.
An Articles page has been added to the site and it contains the inaugural article. Obviously more content will be needed, so if any of you club members have anything to contribute, some topic you'd like to put out there, a book review, a favourite opening, anything that might be of interest, then sharpen your quills, top up your inkwells and get writing and email your productions to Al.
Recently Alf noticed that three of the Club's best chess sets have disappeared. Jon subsequently did a thorough stock take and found that the Club currently possesses:
and confirmed that Alf's suspicions were correct — three of the Club's best sets have vanished. Has anyone any idea as to where they might have gone?
Oswestry Chess Club have been fined £54 by the ECF for fielding three ineligible players in ECF rated games. Marcus, Phil and Paul Wise were not ECF members last year when they played either in League games or the Club Championship so their inclusion in ECF rated games was a breach of the rules. The Club will also incur a fine for the Round 2 Club Championship game in which Phil played Dave Andrews, as neither Phil nor Dave are current ECF members. Consequently Phil and Dave have had to withdraw from the Club Championship.
Oswestry's OTB B team are still scraping along at the foot of Division 2 with one point from four matches. They are definitely not playing at their best and could easily have done better in Match 4 against Maddocks B. See the result and Division 2 League standings on the OTB League: Oswestry B page. You can also play through and download the games when the PGNs become available.
The page showing Oswestry 2's online skirmishes is now up for viewing. The October 10th game has now been played at last, much belatedly. The reporting of the online matches to Shropshire Chess by those responsible for such matters is somewhat hit and miss, so match results may or may not appear on this site with any reliable frequency. The ferreting out of the games' PGN files from Lichess in order to post them on this site has proved to be a tad tedious to say the least, so this has been abandoned. You will just get the match results and the league standings of the two Oswestry teams. Oswestry 2 seems to consist of only three players. Whether this is from lack of interest by our members or a deliberate policy is not known, at least by me. I will endeavour to find out more.
The game view page has been attractivised (it should be a word). Game details are now shown above the board and remain in place, whereas previously they disappeared heavenwards as one stepped through a game. A short menu has been added where one can exit the game or download the pgn file, and a Tips menu item details the options for navigating and viewing the games. In addition, the name of the game's annotator is lifted directly from the pgn file and displayed above the board. In the previous version of the page this was simply a label crediting Rudy as the annotator of all the games. Now the actual annotator is shown and although Rudy has annotated the majority of the games, Gary has admirably annotated his own games and is now correctly credited as annotator. Perhaps we should all annotate our own games — such a practice is said to be very beneficial for one's chess ability.
If you have accessed the Oswestry Chess Club website you may have noticed a 'Not Secure' warning somewhere in the address bar of your browser, or if you have downloaded a PGN from one of the games you may have been warned 'This website is not secure'. However, the site now has an SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate — whoopee — which means that all data exhchanged between your browser and the website is encrypted. This may not be strictly necessary for a site such as ours but it is increasingly the norm for sites to be secured in this manner. If you are observant (and all chess players are surely observant) you will notice that the site's address has changed from http://oswestrychessclub.com to https://oswestrychessclub.com. You don't have to do anything special to reach the newly secured site, you will be redirected automatically. Happy and secure browsing. On a related note, we aim at some point to change the club's domain name from .com (which typically is used for commercial sites) to .org, which more properly reflects our non-profit status.
The Online League page featuring the Oswestry 1 team is now up for your perusal. There was some confusion and some delay about the whole business. Oswestry 1 and Oswestry 2 teams were due to play their first matches on 10th October. Oswestry 1's match duly went ahead, but the result was not posted on the Shropshire Chess website ubtil the 21st October, hence the delay. Oswestry 2's match never happened because their opponents knew nothing about the match taking place — that's the confusion. Oswestry 1 is captained by Adrian, Oswestry 2 has Alf at the helm. Oswestry 2's page will be up once there is a result to be posted.
We proudly announce the birth of a new page — meet 'Club Calendar', where you will find all of the Club's important dates and fixtures for this 24/25 season. Let us wish this new offspring a long and happy life. Cheers!
The pairings for Round two of the Championship were announced by Jon today and are listed on the Club Championship page. Julie had a bye in round 1 after Steve T. dropped out, and Phil has a bye in Round 2.
The whole website has been completely re-written and simplified in an attempt to make it more accessible to those using mobile devices. The old site was unusable when viewing it on a mobile phone. There might still be one or two areas that don't work exaxctly as they should, but these are being worked on. Where game and match tables are too wide for mobile phone screens, users can swipe left to view the hidden part of the table. As regards the pgn display board, this is best viewed with the phone in landscape mode so that both the board and the game moves are visible. A fix for viewing the game board properly in potrait mode is being investigated.
Oswestry 1 and Oswestry 2 online teams make their debut on October 10th in this season's online league. Full details on the relevant page.
The outrageous hike in the fee for hiring our current home, the Oswestry Pensioners Club, has meant that Club finances are strained, to say the least. This has resulted in our being reduced to meeting only once per fortnight. So, the hunt is on for a new club venue. Jon has suggested The White Lion in Oswestry. The manager is willing to let us have a bar to ourselves on Club night and will charge us nothing for privilege of our presence. Win, win. We meet there on the 10th October to sample the place.
The league is now underway for this season and both Oswestry A and B teams have played their first matches. All details are on the relevant pages.
The Club Championship 2024 is now underway, organised, as was last year's Championship, by Jon. Thank you Jon. Full details are on the Club Championship page. The coveted, but so far non-existent, Championship Trophy is up for grabs. Perhaps by the end of the Championship a trophy of a more physical nature will be in existence.
Stay tuned to find out.