The World Senior Team Championships ended with England retaining their 65+ title but missing out on a medal in the 50+. They needed to beat Kazakhstan in the last round to get bronze, but finished with a 2-2 draw. This meant that England 2, where I was playing board 1, even caught them on match points.

I personally managed to score and unbeaten 7/9, gaining around 15 rating points. My improved performance was largely down to concentration and calculation training, the unexpected part of which is solving Shogi Tsume puzzles. The concentration required with these seems to have jolted my brain out of atrophy, I found myself calculating surprisingly well and gained confidence as a result.

In last week's newsletter I suggested that the powerful US team were favourites, and in the end they managed to pip Italy at the post to get gold. Meanwhile the Kazakhstan team got bronze, had they beaten England 1 in the last round they would have been the champions.

There has been some controversy over the selections for the 50+ first team, but I think they made sense at the time and the team played pretty well. Note that the powerful Iceland team also faltered, despite excellent previous results in these events.
 

Training Tournaments

This week's training tournaments feature another two lines from the Building an Opening Repertoire course, this time from White's perspective:

Sunday March 2nd at 5pm UK Time: Colle vs KID with 1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 g6 3.e3 d6

Sunday March 2nd at 6.15pm UK Time: Colle vs Gruenfeld with 1.d4 Nf6 2.Nf3 g6 3.e3 d5

My Upcoming Events

Here's my schedule over the coming months, though it is subject to change. I often don't know until fairly late in the day:

April 4-14 2025: European Senior Team Championship

I finally got confirmation that I'll be in the 50+ 1st team, apparently on board 3 of a team that includes Michael Adams, John Emms, myself, Steve Dishman and Graeme Buckley.

April 24-28 2025: English Senior Championships

I'm hoping to be invited to these and may now be eligible for either section. You can find details here. 

July 31st - 10th August 2025: British Championships
These have now been confirmed for Liverpool on these dates, you can find details here. If I get invited to play in the main Championships, I'll probably accept. Otherwise I'm eligible for both the 50+ and 65+ sections, and should have a chance of doing well in either.

There will probably be one or two events between April and the end of July, it's important to keep playing in order to maintain good form.

Twitch Channel

My new Twitch channel has new shows every Monday ('Chess Questions Answered), the Webinar on training tournaments and games is up on Fridays and another weekly coming soon. Please follow it if you'd like to get updates etc, all the shows will be available to Premium members in the Tiger Chess members area, even when they are no longer available on Twitch.

Have a good weekend.

Nigel