Greeting chess friends,
After a long enforced absence from the chessboard cautious discussions are underway with the aim of restarting over the board chess.
We wanted to keep club members and any new potential club members updated of our progress and we would be interested on hearing your opinions on the below. Feedback is important to us even if you have never visited the chess club before if you have any comments do feel free to let us know your thoughts in the comments box below (you just need to register for an account to comment on the blog but this is quick and easy to do).
Sadly our old venue at The Daten Sports Club in Culcheth has undergone big refurbishments and we no longer feel it is a suitable venue for a chess club. We are grateful however to Nick Burriss in this regard who has managed to secure for us a new venue for chess at “The Pack Horse” in Culcheth https://www.facebook.com/pack.culcheth/.
The room is of a good size and there would be no fee for the room hire involved which is certainly a boon. The only downsides so far with this is disabled access (the room is on the 1st floor) and lighting. The lighting issue should be easily solved by the purchase of some lamps.
With the new venue being agreed a suggested date for chess resumption has been sometime in September. We so far have no details on how many of our neighbouring chess clubs are set to recommence by then. Ideally we will be playing league matches against other teams, however in the absence of this Damian has suggested we could perhaps begin a Club Championship in place of League matches. There is no reason the Championship could not be rated and games played against each other in the same manner which we did in the league. What we would need for this however is enough active players to make it work and the demand for this is currently unknown? Would you be willing to play chess on a regular basis? Again let us know your thoughts on if you would be interested in this in the comments section.
We are also having discussions on what precautions people would feel comfortable with with regards to Covid. Chess can be seen as high risk for transmission of the virus being played indoors at close quarters to your opponent, proposals so far to mitigate this risk have been that all players should wear face masks for the time being and the room should be well ventilated windows left open and tables spaced as far apart as possible. Again we would be most interested in hearing what measures we can take to make you feel comfortable in attending a regular chess club night again.
For now stay safe all and we hope to see you at the chess club in our new home at a date not too far away in the future!