The 1st Essex Online Team Blitz was won today by “Bardish” – an amalgamation of Barking and Cavendish.
The Online Team Blitz competition was organised by Tom Barton and attracted nine entries and held on lichess.org. All players were identified by their lichess.org usernames, so most were unaware of their opponents true identity! This is standard practice with online chess and in keeping with the ECA Playing of Online Chess Policy and will be followed within this report!
Starting at 10.00 am and scheduled to run until 1.00 pm, the task of getting the games played – on lichess.org, each game being raised by a challenge of one player to another – followed by the collecting and reporting of each match result seemed a tall order. But the provision of a reporting form on our WordPress.com blog site, facilitated the task and in the event, the tournament finished bang on 1.00 pm as forecast! The controlling team were in constant contact by an online conference on Zoom, which aided matters to no insignificant extent.
With an odd number of entries, one team had a Bye each round. Wanstead were in the lead up to R6 when they had their Bye, resuming top spot from temporary leaders Writtle who had the Bye in the following round. The winning team had their Bye round as early as R2, so did not show in the leading position until the end of R8. Scores at this time were: Bardish, 21/28; Wanstead 20½; Brentwood, 18½, Writtle, 18. In the last round, Wanstead could only share the points 2-2 with Ilford, but in the event of a tie with Bardish, Wanstead had the tie-break advantage. All was laid clear, however, when Bardish recorded a clean sweep 4-0 against EJCA.
So congratualtions to Bardish [Beachbrilliancy (8), MiceSystem (5½), MartinCrichton (5½), Mr_Mayhem (5)], 24/32.
Following places: =2nd Wanstead, Brentwood, 22½; 4th Writtle, 22; 9 teams.
Board “prizes”
Board 1 – Beachbrilliancy (Bardish), 8/8;
Board 2 – rwhite1970 (Writtle), DudeMediocre* (Wanstead), 6½/8;
Board 3 – David_Spearman* (Wanstead), 7/8; – Corrected
Board 4 – EdenHazard8 (Brentwood), 8/8.
* DudeMediocre and David_Spearman are both shown in the Player stats as a Board lower than given here. However, this was because Wanstead had five players, but two players shared the games on Board 1. Therefore, DudeMediocre and David_Spearman played all their games a Board higher, i.e. ‘3’ was DudeMediocre’s “squad number” but played all on Board 2, ‘4’ was David_Spearman’s “squad number” but played all on Board 3.
Thanks then to Tom Barton for his planning and efficient organisation, with the support of a small team, and to all the team captains for getting the results in quickly. The Zoom meeting hosted by Tom, running throughout, was a masterstroke, enabling anomalies arising from reported results to be sorted out quickly, in most cases by looking directly at the games as played and the results recorded. Without this facility, it is without doubt that the event would have taken quite a bit longer.
For the avoidance of doubt, this event is not to be taken as a continuation of the over-the-board team blitz tournaments and it is not yet ruled out that the OTB Team Blitz might be played later in the year (but no promises).
For a further use of online forms, see the announcement of the ECA Online Championship, being organised by Mark Murrell, announced below this article.