The 2020 Interclub Matches
These were played over 10 weeks and were among the first face-to-face chess matches in the world to be played in the Covid-19 environment. We followed strict Covid-19 guidelines with the boards spaced out as far as possible and all the sets, boards and clocks sanitised after each round. All the players and spectators were also required to fill in the contact-tracing sheets on entry, as well as sanitise their hands and bump elbows at the start and end of each game.
That being said and done, it was great fun. It was just fabulous to play someone across the board again, rather than across the Internet and the competitions were amazingly close. Bill Jordan was the arbiter and it all ran smoothly, apart from running 10 minutes late each time through no fault of his own .. rather Alan trying frantically to try ensure players all had a game.
There were only 5 teams in the A Grade which was very messy but it was played as a double round-robin and so the B Grade which had 8 teams was played as a 7 round round-robin and then a Swiss for the final 3 extra rounds. A new program called Orion was used for the pairings and it was not easy to use or able to cope with these different tournament formats.
The final Results:
A Grade
1st Matisons 20.5
2nd Adelaide 20
3rd Modbury 14
4th K&B Red 12
5th K&B Orange 6.5
The final round was particularly tense – Matisons had the bye and only just needed the K&B Orange team to take a point off the Adelaide team to win the competition and that looked like it had happened when Mathew Drogmuller was substituted in to the K&B Orange team at the last moment against Chris Benham and won relatively early, allowing the Matisons team to go off celebrating, little realising that there is rule that new players cannot be entered into a team in the last round if they had not played in the competition at all that season. Fortunately for Matisons, Jwalit Parikh for the K&B Orange team saved the day by winning on board 4.
The Matisons team consisted of IM Trevor Tao, Michael Hoff, Robert Hoile, Aivars Lidums with Peter Gregoric and Peter Ballard substituting for a few rounds.
B Grade
The B Grade competition was also very close and decided in the last round too. There were 8 teams and it was very pleasing to see a good number of new players taking part for the first time.
Final Standings:
1st West Torrens – 31.5
2nd Modbury – 30
3rd Norwood – 24
4th K&B Green – 18.5
5th Adelaide – 15.5
6th K&b Yellow – 15.0
7th K&B Blue – 12.0
8th Extras Newagency – 11.5
The West Torrens Team consisted of Alex Maschkowsky, Anthony Haywood, Laslo Kanovics and Ben Smith with Michel Barone, Tom Windram and Rick Lu as reserves.
So congratulations to all who took part – we hope you had fun!
