Good Afternoon, John.
Good afternoon, Danny
Now John, tell us all a bit about the St Albans Chess Club.
My pleasure, Danny, yes of course. Actually the club has been going for over 100 years now, way before my time, but I now have the honour of being its president. It is organised exclusively to play chess and for chess players in the area. Our membership runs from the highly serious top county players to players who just like to play socially on a Monday evening.
Right
We also have a very active Junior Section, which was established by one of our members, Terry Douse, who set it up about 10 years ago and it has been very successful. The Junior Section meets before the main club on a Monday evening which is good for both, because if members turn up early they get a chance to play a junior member, which might help knock some of their rust spots off and also gives the juniors a chance to have a hack at our good players which they enjoy and some of them get us shock I can assure you.
Yes, I would imagine so; you do hear stories about a young wiz kid who beats some grand master or something like that.
What is the youngest age of your junior members?
Probably from about 10 or 11 upwards. In fact we have had members go through to become full members and we have one of our original junior members, David Phillips, now helping out with the organisation of it and we are very grateful to him for that.
Any age really up to end of secondary level.
You say you meet on Mondays at 7.30pm and the juniors meeting at 7pm. Where exactly do you meet?
Right, that is at the London Road Estate Resident Association which is in Cell Barnes Lane off of Drakes Drive. They have two wonderful 200 year old barns; I do not know if you know the place?
I think I might have DJ’d a wedding reception there.
Oh, Yes I am sure that is the reason.
Absolutely; only for chess you understand
Effectively the main season is just about starting now and we are all trying to knock the rust off before the league starts next week.
Right, okay, you have recently enjoyed a bit of success as well, as a club.
Yes we were elected the ECF, that’s the English Chess Federation, Club of the Year for 2009 which I was really pleased with because it reflects a lot of hard that our members have put in.
Sure
Junior chess was one of the features. We also try to do our bit for society. In fact the Fleetville Band Society said they would like to run a chess simultaneous event which was quite a strange combination but we did it and we had quite of lot of players turning up to play one of our experts.
Right, so the EFC tell us, that has got to be the English Chess Federation?
Yes, the English Chess Federation that is kind of the governing body for England.
So if you have been awarded their club of the year, I am guessing there would be quite a few clubs up for that title. Would that be right?
Absolutely, I did not actually see the entry list; I just got told about the result and I was absolutely delighted when I heard that we had won and we were actually presented with the certificate last week when we ran our simultaneous competition against Paul Littlewood.
Right, I would imagine there must be hundreds of chess clubs throughout England, if not thousands.
Certainly several hundred I would think and St Albans would be typical. Well in the Herts League, so just in Hertfordshire, you would be looking at twenty to twenty-five clubs and probably five times that number of teams. We run seven teams, which is probably the largest number of teams going into that league. Lots of clubs run multiple teams, because that way you give everybody a chance, right down to players who want to do a bit socially but want to give themselves the challenge of playing matches, right through to the ones getting close to the England level.
OK – your adult members what sort of size of group and make up of the group. Is it all men aged 43 or is it a bit of a mixture. How does it all shape up?