Bournemouth Junior Chess team vs Lytchett Minster Senior School 24th June 2023
Lytchett Minster School (LMS) came to play in an invitational match to give their junior players the opportunity to compete and play against juniors at our club.
It was great to see a competition of 11 players from both teams competing over 3 rounds. The time control was 15 minutes each in an attempt to slow down the blitz and rapid games. In the main this was successful.
The overall score was 22-11 in favour of the Bournemouth juniors including our two top players (Finn and Leo) playing in the 1st round only. This made a big difference and consequently we opened up our team pairings right across the boards to give everyone experience in playing competition chess.
Some of the LMS players were also less experienced and were quite new to chess so the2nd and 3 rd round scores of 6-5 and 6-5 both put this into perspective and was successful.
Overall, it was great to see all the players competing, some on both sides for the 1st time and junior chess as a whole were the winners in this enjoyable event.
We will post individual scores in a separate posting but I would like to thank Tarik for bringing the LMS team over and we hope to have a return match in the not-too-distant future.
A commemorative trophy was presented to our captain on the day – Finn, which will be passed on to other 15 players that represented us on the day.
We took the opportunity of presenting the Dorset championship under 8 and under 10 shields, won by Nathaniel and Rafan respectively in February this year. Both are members of our club so congratulations to them and Zander and Leo who are also Dorset champions this year. 4 in total from our club!
Refreshments were provided by Dee and I was delighted to take empty carrier bags home!
In our regular weekly lessons, we were pleased to have another 13 regulars to learn and play some chess on a hot and sticky day, so thank you for coming along and hopefully enjoying the morning.
It felt like an overall mini congress with a total of 40 juniors at our club – marvellous!
Many thanks to Graham Morris, Graham Hillman and Steve who managed the regular sessions.
