Club Subscriptions
Subscriptions for 2025/2026 are now due. See here for details on how to pay.
Upcoming Events
2nd Barnstaple Rapidplay 11th October
The event will again be held at Alverdiscott Village Hall. Get your entries in soon!. Let's see if we can build on last year's success and increase the level of participation. For further details click here.Jurassic Rapidplay 18th October
Further details here.Wells Rapidplay 18th October
Further details here.Simultaneous Exhibition - Thursday 11th September
Our own international master, Jack Rudd, has kindly agreed to help us kick off the new season by holding a simultaneous exhibition. This is a great opportunity for members to pit themselves against our the club's strongest player.For those who haven't taken part in a simultaneous before, Jack gets to play white in all the games. After his initial move at each board participants think about their response. When, and only when, Jack returns to their board they must play their response within a few seconds. Jack will play his next move then move to the next board. The process repeats until all the games are ended. It's important that moves are played with minimal delay otherwise we won't be able to complete the games in the course of the evening. Here's a link on Wikipedia that describes how it typically works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simultaneous_exhibition
Games will not be graded so there's no danger of losing grading points! Please don't arrange any games for this evening and do your best to come along and take part.Summer Competition 2025
The summer competition has now started! Latest results are: hereECF 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