And so it came to pass. The NLC Chess Circle, furthering it’s long tradition, went online.
It was certainly experimental. With the Circle for the first time using Turing machines to speed the exchange of correspondence chess moves there were always going to be a few teething problems.
Trial and error abound as players signed up, ‘joined’ the online club and ‘entered’ the tournament. A far cry from the usual Lib chess strategy of turn up, get club red, shove 1.e4 and hope for the best.
But we got there, mostly. After some shuffling around we had Captain ‘Hardicanute’ Chamberlain, Mister ‘GiffinNLC’ Giffin QC MA (Oxon), Doctor ‘antquox’ Saldanha, Mister ‘MisterWiddicombe’ Widdicombe and our very welcome Reform Club guest Benedikt ‘benediktkoehler’ Koehler. (Miss ‘Leegunner1’ Widger was banging at the door to join but was unable, seemingly too late to join the tournament after it has started – a wrinkle that will be ironed out for next time, when no doubt Miss Widger will hand out some distance chess punishment to us all.)
And so a few sample games. They are not brilliancies. The games were ten minutes per side, so pretty much blitz (we’ll lengthen this next time), and Mister Widdicombe was dipping in and out of his games as he helped others join. As we play more we’ll become more practiced and things will become a little more natural.
So more for the historical record than the furtherance of chess knowledge, here are three games from the first night’s online play:
The evening was judged a success, and will be repeated next week. We hope to join up more with the wider Tuesday social crowd. It would be great to have a few more players. Whilst of course we couldn’t see each other, there was plenty of friendly chit chat over the messaging function and it was a pleasure in these difficult times to be with our chess playing friends and clubmates.
