Press Report 4^th December 2020

The online South Hams Chess Club continues to be very busy and producing some surprising results every week. Results I’m sure no one would bet on keep springing up. Richard Thomas had his best result ever when he beat Phil McConnell, Arthur Doble running into form beating Quentin Thwaites and James Fowler, while James also lost to Steve Levy.

Alan Davies remained unbeaten this week with two draws against Quentin and also James Schofield, certainly his best result this season. Clifford Peach drew against Chris Willcox, while Ken Ashby beat Trevor Hurt.

The week also saw an extraordinary run of defeats for one of the club’s top players David Archer, who lost three games more than he normally loses in a season. It started with losses against Chris Willcox, Tony Tatam and then only Monday night against Trevor Hurt. This was Trevor’s best game to date; he completely outplayed David in a tricky end game, which finished with a Queen & Rook checkmate, a real classic to watch.

Steve Levy still remains top of the Homan League with the middle order swapping and changing every week, it’s such a close run competition with no predictability at all.

Away from club matches in the 4National Chess League Autumn Congress both Tony Tatam and Clifford Peach had a disappointing finish for their last game, both suffered mouse slips which threw away both games due to no fault of their own. This being part of the downside of online chess, but this does happen to everyone as only last week it happened to World Champion Magnus Carlsen in one of his games.