Welcome to Barnstaple Chess Club

We meet on a Thursday evening from 7:30pm at the Conservative Club in Barnstaple. If you are interested in joining the club please see our Contact Page for further details.

East Devon Chess Congress

Friday 20th March - Sunday 22nd March 2026

AT THE EXETER ROUGEMONT HOTEL BY SUNDAY, QUEEN STREET, EXETER

Full details at their new website: www.eastdevonchesscongress.org

Entry is now OPEN for the 2026 East Devon Chess Congress, which will take place from Friday 20 March to Sunday 22 March 2026 at the elegant Exeter Rougemont Hotel by Sunday, in the heart of the historic city of Exeter.

Alongside the usual tournaments and socialising, this year’s programme includes some special features to mark 50 years of the East Devon Chess Congress, including...

- Saturday night simultaneous by GM Keith Arkell [£6 add-on] - JackPot bullet competition vs IM Jack Rudd - Puzzle contest [with prizes] - Coaching zone

As usual, three sections will be available to accommodate all levels of play - the Open, U-1900 Major, and U-1650 Minor. Each of these competitions will be a 5-round Swiss tournament with an incremental time control of 105 min + 10 sec/move (3 hour 50 minute play sessions approximately). We are delighted to confirm that we will be based in the same spacious and comfortable ballroom used for the 2025 Congress.

Please note that entry will be limited to 110 players - so if you're keen to join the action, please don't delay in submitting your entry!

DCCA Events for 2025/26

Confirmed dates for this season's events are now here

Winter Competition 2025/2026

The winter competition latest results are: here

ECF Membership

If you're serious about your chess I'd strongly recommend members to join the ECF. This allows your club competition games to be submitted to ECF which allows you to get an official grading. ECF membership also means you can enter any ECF rated tournament for a year without incurring additional fees. There are several tournaments held each year in Devon (and elsewhere!) and of course there are inter-club competitions run by the DCCA.

The ECF Calendar of events is here: ECF event calendar

For further details see ECF

Our club on Lichess

We recently created a presence for our club on Lichess - the link is here: https://lichess.org/team/barnstaple-chess-club In order to join the "team" you'll need to have your own account on Lichess and ensure you're logged in. You should then be able to see a "Join Team" button on that page. Click to join and wait for your request to be accepted (may take a few hours).

Note: Access to the teams functionality on Lichess is only available in a browser (not the Lichess app). Teams functionality is under the Community menu.

If we get enough interest in this We could arrange our own online tournaments Time limits can be configured, so we could play blitz, rapid or classical time formats. Maybe we could play blitz tournaments on a regular basis (weekly? monthly?). Arena tournaments can be configured to run for a predefined period (e.g. 1 hour) at a fixed time (e.g. 7pm every Wednesday). During this period you can play as many (or as few) games as you want - the more games you win the higher your tournament score. We can set the schedule for our tournaments to meet our needs.

I'm no expert on this! I have played (once) in an online tournament and it was great fun! If anyone has more experience of Lichess tournaments, or any other ideas to improve participation please let me know: peteworthington@gmail.com