You may have heard the sad news that David Everington died a few days ago. I have collected a few comments together from club members, as well as including a few pictures and games. Given that we are devastated at this loss to the Shropshire Chess Community, we can only imagine the loss to Jen and the rest of the family; our deepest sympathy and loving thoughts to them at this difficult time. Mark, our Club Secretary, wrote as follows: I’m sorry to have to report that David Everington has passed away. Most of you will have your own memories of David and I believe that Francis is going to…

Please note that the Club Championship page has been updated to reflect the 2020/21 information. Thank you to Tony Purser for organising this. A guide to using the LiChess platform can be found here. Good luck to everyone and please pass any thoughts for website material to me and I will endeavour to oblige. Francis Best

Greetings chess players! With over the board chess off the agenda currently, I thought it would be good to add some video content to our website. In response to my request, David Everington sent me the scores of two games he played last season where he had faced Owen’s Defence. Rather than just give you the scores of the games, I thought it would be nice to create a video of the analysis. So here it is: I’m still getting the hang of this video creation lark, so do bear with me. The best way of improving is practice, though, so I will try to produce some more, maybe covering…

Thursday 21st November saw Shrewsbury B travel to Newport for the second time in the space of a month to take on Newport B. At least this time we were able to field a full side and were pretty much at full strength. Newport were missing two of their big guns, with neither Athar Ansari nor Tony Holdford available. The match hinged on the result of two games as the other three were concluded peacefully quite quickly. I saw almost nothing of Ile’s game against Stuart Ross on board one, so am relying on Ile’s comments afterwards. Ile played his normal opening, which it seems Stuart was well prepared for.…

Peter has annotated his game against Matthew Clark here. Francis Best

Friday 1st November saw Shrewsbury B take on Telepost A in our third match of the season.  We were without Francis for this one, and Ted has now moved to Manchester, so Dan Lockett and Jim Wilkinson were drafted in. Telepost were also slightly under strength, without the services of Trevor Brotherton, Phil Zabrocki and John Bashall but they still looked a good side. A slight tweak was made to our board order as we swapped Ile and Peter around, with Ile now playing on board one.  This was partly to give Peter a bit of a break from board one, but also because Ile has played well against Nigel…

Shrewsbury B faced an uphill struggle against champions Newport A on Thursday.  Unfortunately, we were only able to field three players due to a combination of circumstances.  Newport were also below full strength (no Lawrence Cooper, Nick Rutter or Nick Arkell), so, as Ian Jamieson pointed out after the match it might have been interesting had we been able to field a full team. The games which did take place were Peter Kitchen on board 1, White against Nat Paul, Olesegun Ilesanmi with Black on board 2 against Ian Jamieson, and Mark Smith White on board 3 against Chris Lewis. There was general amusement at the opening on board 2…

Shrewsbury B played their season opener against Maddocks A last Friday.  Shrewsbury were without Ile, who has been working nights, and Dan Lockett stepped in. The first challenge of the evening was to arrange the tables so that everyone could play comfortably as we now have less space then previously.  I think it was just about ok. I am not going to get into opening details too much this season, partly because some people have raised concerns about giving away opening secrets, but mostly because I’ve come to the conclusion that worrying about what everyone else is playing is not good for my own opening play! All of the positions…

Shrewsbury B team enjoyed a truncated evening on their latest outing to Newport when we faced their B team. Not for the first time this season we were forced to default a board with both Tony and Ian unavailable.  Even so, we approached the match with confidence, as our four were pretty strong.  Added to this, Newport were missing some of the players who gave us a hard time earlier in the season. Board 1 saw Ile with White take on Danny Griffiths.  No prizes for guessing Ile’s first move: 1.b4!  Danny reacted with the line I was shown when I first saw this opening; he played 1…e5 followed by…

Shrewsbury B team’s match with Church Stretton A could reasonably be called lively, not just for chess reasons.  As some of us knew, Church Stretton were forced to change venue recently, due to the closure of the club where they used to play.  The new venue, the Bucks Head, is a nice pub with a lively atmosphere.  The first drama of the evening occurred when I got a phone call off Ted.  He and Ivor were outside the old venue which was obviously closed; I thought Ivor knew!  At least there was no damage done, as Stretton is a small place and they weren’t far away.  The second drama unfolded…