I remember the old rhyme 30 days hath September. The modern day has 30 days in March 60 in April, 100 in May and 200 in June!
I'm sure someone said it was going to be quiet during the lockdown and it would be a good chance for us to recharge our batteries. I seem to have not got that memo as I am more in demand than every before (not complaining as I really enjoy it)!!
So this weekend was the inaugural Chess Scotland Online Allegro and Lightning Championships. Karen and I decided that we wanted to bring tournament offering prizes back and with the help of the Scottish Chess Tour with the different experiments with formats, we decided on what was the easiest to manage.
Published the entry form and waited for the flood of entries. Fast forward to 1 week before and I am bricking myself as I have 5 entries in the Allegro and 2 in the Lightning! I came across an ad to take part in a virtual orchestra on Sunday and mentioned it to Karen. She told me not to be daft as Chess Players leave it to the last minute before entering. Dubiously I listened to her but resolved I would go for it on Friday night if we did not have the entries.
As is usual in life when dealing with my wife, it is safer to listen and just do it. She is normally right (even when she is wrong!). I was looking for 20 for the allegro and 10 for the lightning and we surpassed that.
Shut down my machine on Friday night, ready for the Allegro at 10:30 am on Saturday (for some reason there seems to be a bit of titillation in England that we refer to Rapidplay as Allegro Not sure why as the tournaments have been referred to as Allegros since before I got involved!). Noticed there was a Windows update waiting for me so ran it. Woke up Saturday morning and turned on my machine. Nothing. No booting to Windows. The update had failed and had jammed the boot sequence up. I have 45 minutes to the start of play and my laptop is down.
I have to confess to using some words that were dirtier than lavvie paper! I managed to get it going again by booting to safe mode and removing the offending update. 30 minutes to go. Lets get Swiss Manager up and running. Everything is fine, chatting to the players in the chatroom and it is time to publish the round 1 draw. Virus checker decided that javaflo is a virus. *sigh* The laptop nearly ended up in the garden.
Players were brilliant. we had some good banter in the chat room with questions being asked like where the canteen was. I really had a good time running it. I had whatsapp running in the background so players had that, internal messaging email or chatroom if they needed to get a hold of me. Round 1 and 4 I had clubmates playing the top seed GM Matthew Turner. There was a flurry of messages in the club whatsapp group as everyone wanted the links to watch.
Sunday and it was the day of the lightning. This time the computer did not decide to misbehave and again things went smoothly, well almost smoothly. After round 5 I announced a 10 minute toilet break. It was that or it was going to get messy. It appears that not everyone was paying attention to the chat room as I got a couple of bemused emails asking when the next round started!
Again it was a day of banter and good natured chess. This was a different arbiter experience concentrating on 13 Windows while my son tried to give me a Fathers day present. Online arbiting is a lot of fun and as hard as offline. Feels weird not having to look for illegal moves or irregularities!
Have to feel sorry for the player in time trouble on Saturday who faced this position and played Kc4??
On a final note, we received news last night that our good friend Andrew Burnett had had a heart attack and was in hospital. He appears to be doing well. We all wish him a speedy recovery and look forward to seeing him fit and healthy back at the board.
