The Huntsville Chess Club hosted a double round-robin blitz event this week at the main branch of the Huntsville Library.  The tournament showcased the unique time control of G/3;inc 7, which is the same as the Chess in a Cave tournament scheduled for November.

The participants quickly learned that, with a 7 second increment, the games can last much, much longer than 3 minutes.  Bullet chess moves are not advised!

After the smoke cleared, Bill and new Huntsville Chess Club Member, Miles Melvin, were tied with 7.5 points out of 10 and declared the winners.  Joel Friedman was a close second with 6.

Results (click to zoom)

City Championship

Over the past couple of years, there has been a distinct lack of rated (non-scholastic) tournaments in the Huntsville area.  That is something that the Huntsville Chess Club would like to change.  Traveling great distances to attend chess tournaments can be fun and a good way to break up the possibility of playing the same few chess players over and over again, but it should not be a requirement.

In an effort to change that, we plan to host a City Championship tournament at some point in the next 30-60 days.  The most likely venue will be at the Hampton Inn in Hampton Cove on a Saturday and Sunday.  Please pay close attention to the club blogs in the coming weeks as more details will be announced as we gather information.

Multi-Week G/60;d5 Swiss at the Library

Over the past year, we’ve focused almost exclusively on hosting Monday Night tournaments with Quick and Blitz rated only time controls.   This has been well-received by our membership, who enjoy tournament chess, but may not want to put their standard rating on the line after a long day of work.  However, we realize that our membership is also composed of players who don’t necessarily enjoy playing games that make it difficult to notate and learn from after the tournament is completed.

An alternative time control of G/60;d5 has been suggested to spread across multiple weeks (the first attempt would most likely be 4 weeks in a row).  This idea has been considered in the past, but abandoned due to the sometimes sporadic nature of chess player attendance.  Now that we’ve begun to establish a baseline of consistent attendance with quite a few strong players, we would like to revisit this topic.

It would be unreasonable to expect all attendees to be able to attend every single week (though we’d love it if that’s what happened), so half-point byes would be available for all but the final round with at least 24 hour notice.

Please use the poll below to let us know if you would be interested in attending a tournament like this.  If you would, we’ll do our best to give it a trial run ASAP!  As always, please post questions or comments below.  We’ll do our best to respond in a timely manner.

The Huntsville Chess Club