Bored at the board? We’ve got just the thing. New for 2022, Battersea Chess Club is launching a series of kid-friendly chess variant tournaments to mix it up for all our wonderful members.
The idea behind it: to show off the incredible range of fun you can have playing chess with only just a tiny tweak to the traditional rules.
What’s the first event? We’ll reveal all soon.
When’s the first event? It’ll start at 6pm this Tuesday!
Where’s the first event? Our normal venue.
Why? There’ll be fun and medals to be won!
The Battersea Variants events will help fill some time on selected Tuesdays during our Power Hour, starting from 6pm. There’ll be one hour of chess variants taking us into our standard chess evening. In total, we’re planning 11 tournaments.
We know this won’t be for everyone, but everyone is welcome to come along and give it a try. However, spaces will be limited. Unless otherwise mentioned, each tournament will be open for no more than the first 20 members to arrive.
Every time it’s held, the variant will be different from the one before but easy enough for every chess player to understand – and we’ll explain.
What will be interesting is how easy it will be for people to adapt their current knowledge to fit the new strategies required to get the wins.
We’re hoping to completely blindside some existing built-up chess skills and theory and try to reveal those with some natural flair and talent.
The variants themselves will likely be announced a day or two before for people to get their heads around. On occasions, it may come as a complete surprise.
We will mostly be using a Swiss pairing tournament format of five rounds with quite speedy time controls to get it done in our 60-75 minute time frame.
We’ll put out a donation jar if you want to help keep these events going (but there’s no pressure to contribute).
Naturally, we can’t grade these games but for every variant, there will be engraved Gold, Silver and Bronze medals up for grabs for those who finish in the top three.
Let’s see who can grab the most medals by the end of 2022!
