The tournament is now finished. Thank you to all the players who took part. Congratulations to the section winners, who each become club champion for their section for 2024:
Open – Gwilym Price on 6.5/8
Minor – Sean Sussex on 7/8.

A total of 59 players entered the tournament, which sets a new record.

Round 2 took place tonight. As before, the results mostly went the way of the rating in both sections. In the Open, 7 players share the lead on 2/2. In the Minor, 3 players share the lead on 2/2. Expect to see some heavyweight clashes next week.

The tournament numbers increased to 57 with one further entry to the Open from next week onwards.

There was a late flurry of entries bringing the total to 56 (Open 41, Minor 15). This is a new record. Setting the upper limit of the Minor at 1550 seems to have achieved the aim of bringing members of the Beginners' Group into competitive tournament play. Well done them.

In both sections, the results very much went with the ratings. Although this is less meaningful in the Minor where more of the ratings are estimates. The last game in the Open did not finish until 10.30pm. One of the most heartening features of the evening was the beginners' post-match analysis in the downstairs room with Seb Galer, Peter Hegarty, Sean Sussex and others.

The Surrey Border League finished on a high note for Guildford when the A team beat Sandhurst A by 3.5–1.5. The highlight was Gwilym Price beating Steven Jones on board 2, taking revenge for his loss to Steven in this fixture earlier in the season. This means Guildford A finish runners up to Sandhurst A in the Division 1 table.

The internal rapidplay has finally ended, after 30 evenings and 93 rounds featuring 62 players. Riyad Bensoussane and James Toon both finished on 25 points so will play off for the title over the summer.

All eyes now turn to the summer tournament, due to start on 3 June. This will be the only organised event in the club for a period of 8 weeks from 3 June.

Introducing the 2024 edition of the Guildford Summer Tournament, incorporating the club championship. Entries opened today and will close on 1 June. Will we match last year's record 51 entries?

For more details see the Tournaments page.

The congress took place over the weekend. It ran smoothly and the players seemed to enjoy it. A total of 164 players took part. 75 in the Open, 61 in the Major and 28 in the Minor.

Guildford players featured strongly in the prizes:

• In the Open, Alex Golding and Gwilym Price were among a group of six players who tied for 1st place on 4/5.
• In the Major, Liam Ireland came equal 1st on 4.5/5. Harry Taylor came equal 3rd on 4/5. Julien Shepley also came equal 3rd, but walked away with the prize for the best senior player congress-wide.
• In the Minor, none of ours won a prize, but there's an honourable mention for Ivy Piatt who finished just outside the prizes on 3.5/5.

Next year's event takes place at the same venue from Friday 11 April to Sunday 13 April 2025.

The congress has now reached maximum capacity, with 160 entrants. This is very encouraging. There are still 9 days to go until the start, so we would clearly have received a lot more by then if we had enough room.

Almost all the pre-event organisation has been done. We are still short of volunteers from the club to help over the weekend. A separate email will go to club members about that.

Here are some stats about the event.

• There are 74 players in the Open, 58 in the Major (<2000) and 28 in the Minor (<1600).
• The average rating is 2039 in the Open, 1705 in the Major and 1420 in the Minor.
• 25 members of Guildford have entered.
• There are 55 juniors in the event (one-third of the total), including 35 in the Open. That's aged under 18 on 1 January 2024.
• There are 22 seniors in the event. That's aged 60+ on 1 January 2024.
• There are 9 female players in the event.
• The youngest player is aged 8 and the oldest is aged 95.
• The highest-rated player is last year's winner, IM Gediminas Sarakauskas, rated 2443.
• There are 4 IMs, 3 FIDE Masters, 1 Woman FIDE Master, and 4 Candidate Masters.
• 22 different FIDE Federations are represented.

So maybe we should call this the Guildford International Chess Congress…

Further success for Guildford teams in last night's matches, this time in the Surrey League. In Division 1, Guildford 1 beat Wimbledon 1 by 5.5–2.5. In Division 4, Guildford 4 beat Kingston 3 by 5–1. In both matches, the Guildford teams outrated their opponents by about 130 points a board.

Mike Gunn led a session for the Beginners and Improvers, demonstrating basic checkmates in pawnless positions. Interestingly these included King, Bishop and Knight v King, which is far from basic.

The internal rapidplay completed 74 rounds. Tauseef Rahman won all three of his games last night to move into second place in the table. James Toon and Adam Sefton are the only players still on 100%.

The Guildford FIDE Congress now has 132 entries, just a few short of last year's total of 136 with over two weeks to go.

Congratulations to Guildford 2 captain Rory Davies and his squad, who finished top of the Surrey League Division 3 and won the Ellam Trophy. Everything came down to the last match v Richmond on Tuesday 19 March. Guildford 2 won 4–2 to finish level on match points (5.5) and game points (27). The final tie-break was direct encounter, and of course that went in favour of Guildford. The teams were equally matched on paper, so this was a good result. Wins for Julien Shepley, Peter Horlock and David Carpenter.

This means promotion to Division 2 (Beaumont Cup) next season.

The club's first trophy of the season was the Surrey Border League Haslemere Trophy. The Guildford Juniors beat Fleet & Farnborough 5.5–4.5 in the final on 26 February. Congratulations to the squad and their manager Paul Welling.

In Monday's Surrey Border League matches, both Guildford teams were victorious. Guildford B beat Reading A by 3.5–1.5 in Division 2, and Guildford E beat Basingstoke A 3–2 in Division 5. That's a long way to travel in a losing cause. The Guildford B match featured two very different games on the top two boards. Julien Shepley won very quickly on board 2 when his opponent dropped a rook in a calm position and had to resign. James Toon was the last to finish, but had to defend accurately to hold the draw in an ending with bishop and three pawns v knight and four pawns.

The latest Andrew Martin training session featured an analysis of an exciting GM game. The internal rapidplay completed 71 rounds. Hats off to Ian Deswarte who won all three of his games.

The Guildford FIDE Congress now has 118 entries and looks likely to sell out by the end of the month.