Congress 2025
This will be Scarborough's 48th Congress and will be held at the Spa Complex from Friday 24th October to Sunday 26th October 2025.
Full details will follow.
Website update
Now that our congress has concluded for 2024 we're now looking ahead to 2025 so this is a good time to look at updating our website .... currently, this site is built on Joomla! 3 which is now no longer supported so we'll be updating to Joomla! 4 very shortly which may go onto version 5 so you may experience odd things with this site during this process. The aim is to get everything up and running before the new year when we'll have everything in place for 2025 including leaflets. We'll notify everyone who has entered our congress during the last 3 years when it's all up and running and full details of Congress 2025. Thanks for your support and interest.
Further Update (29th October)
We have now submitted all results for rating to both the ECF and FIDE.
We're hoping to confirm the booking of the Spa for 2025 on 30th October.
Winnings
Having collected banking details at the end of the congress has allowed us to make prompt payments and out of the 48 winners we now only have 1 person left to pay ....
Adamjeet Singh
So please forward your bank details to allow us to transfer your winnings.
Update (29th October)
We are receiving many, many remarks on how well the congress went and how much they enjoyed it which is very much appreciated. It's also appreciated how many people have donated towards the congress .... several of the people who could not make it due to illness donated their entry fees and Roger Greatorex is even wanting to donate his winnings! We must also mention John Cawston who kindly donated a box of Quality Street for our arbiters to consume during the event - many thanks.
We are overwhelmed .... yes, a lot of work goes on behind the scenes and yes, the Spa isn't the cheapest of venues but it's all worth the effort when we receive this kind of feedback. And we'll endeavour to make it better ... we tried to include the Junior Rapidplay but it's probably likely we'll now concentrate on the congress and add something into it for juniors. And its highly likely we'll make it a 6 section event next year but we must first wrap up this years and book next years before we can finalise anything so watch this space!
Scarborough 47th Congress - Report
Despite the withdrawals due to illness, we had a good 350+ entry level with many travelling over 300 miles to attend noting our regular attendee, Reinhard Schmerwitz, who travelled over from Germany. So many thanks to everyone. The weather was good and our congress ran very well thanks to our arbiting team from Doncaster and Douglas Vleeshhouwer from Hull looking after our FIDE rating Open & Major sections. James Fisher once again provided the bookstall from Chess & Bridge in London. We found the Spa's Ocean Room having had a refurbishment since last year resulting in their canteen area being removed from the near the entrance resulting in the bar being used for refreshments instead. This area would normally have been for our Open section but the expected higher noise levels in this area meant we had to move the open into the window area at the side. The downside here was the relatively poor lighting in the evening. In the end with Saturday evening also proving awkward we took the decision to make some adjustments and moved the tables to where the lights were best - this made a huge difference but did mean renumbering all the boards but worth the effort and ensured there were no further problems. The Open in this new location also benefited on having a sea view although we suspect they were more focused on their games. This year we welcomed Nigel Davies GM as the only grandmaster present and he was on course of claiming our first prize but blundered and just missed out allowing newcomer Koby Kalavannan FM to claim it for himself with a good 4.5 score after a long battle in round 5 being one of the last to finish. In the other sections we also saw some good first place scores of 4.5 scores from Tony Quaite in the Major, Utku Deniz Demir in the Intermediate and Nathan Madzia and Vladyslav Drabych in the Minor but only one person managed a clean sweep of 5 out of 5 and this was Daniel Wilson in the Foundation. In all we had 48 people winning a prize. Congratulations to all of them but very much hope everyone else still enjoyed their weekend despite missing out. Our full list of winners is shown below.
All results are published on chess-results.com with the following links ....
Open, Major, Inter, Minor, Foundation.
Open
1st | Koby Kalavannan FM | 4.5 points | £700 |
2nd= | Jacob Connor Boswell | 4 points | £125 |
Donald Mason | 4 points | £125 | |
Alan Peart | 4 points | £125 | |
Adithya Vaidyanathan | 4 points | £125 |
Rating Prizes
Under 2100 | Paul Hutchinson | 3.5 points | £25 |
Christopher Bak | 3.5 points | £25 | |
Hao Ran Leung | 3.5 points | £25 | |
Sai Vaddhireddy | 3.5 points | £25 | |
Under 1980 | Shambavi Hariharan | 2.5 points | £50 |
Andrew Ponting | 2.5 points | £50 |
Major
1st | Toby Quaite | 4.5 points | £500 |
2nd= | James Hall | 4 points | £117 |
Mohammad Mozaffari | 4 points | £117 | |
Sathya Vaidyanathan | 4 points | £117 |
Rating Prizes
Under 1930 | Leo Keely | 3.5 points | £34 |
Francis Best | 3.5 points | £34 | |
Alan Jelfs | 3.5 points |
£34 |
|
Under 1860 | Richard Sanger | 3 points | £100 |
Intermediate
1st | Utku Deniz Demir | 4.5 points | £500 |
2nd= | Robert Clegg | 4 points | £58 |
William Clinton | 4 points | £58 | |
Simon Maydew | 4 points | £58 | |
Keith Aitchison | 4 points | £58 | |
Paul Butterworth | 4 points | £58 | |
Paul Doherty | 4 points | £58 |
Rating Prizes
Under 1765 | Roger Greatorex | 3.5 points | £100 |
Under 1704 | Jon Blackburn | 3.5 points | £100 |
Minor
1st= | Nathan Madzia | 4.5 points | £375 |
Vladyslav Drabych | 4.5 points | £375 | |
3rd= | Chris Tinker | 4 points | £25 |
Arthur Hibbitt | 4 points | £25 | |
Luke Julyan | 4 points | £25 | |
Christopher Lund | 4 points | £25 |
Rating Prizes
Under 1625 | Ted Ronald | 4 points | £100 |
Under 1565 | Anthony Jinks | 3.5 points | £100 |
Note that Ted Ronald shared 3rd place but he has been awarded the rating prize instead.
Foundation
1st | Daniel Wilson | 5 points | £400 |
2nd | Alan Tunnacliffe | 4.5 points | £200 |
3rd= | Adamjeet Singh | 4 points | £17 |
Ethan Gaffney | 4 points | £17 | |
Naill Bower-Costigan | 4 points | £17 | |
Sara Kundan Khan | 4 points | £17 | |
Michael Springett | 4 points | £17 | |
Peter Galloway | 4 points | £17 |
Rating Prizes
Under 1460 | Stephanie Brown | 3.5 points | £34 |
Patrick Coleman | 3.5 points | £34 | |
Martin Fletcher | 3.5 points | £34 | |
Under 1300 | Malcolm Green | 3 points | £100 |
News
Our congress has now finished and we've received a lot of positive comments reagarding how it's gone which are appreciated.
Games in the Open, Major & Inter have already been submitteed for rating, Minor & Foundation will be done later today along with a list of winners in each section.
In the end we had a decent entry of around 350 again but sadly, we had many people having to withdraw at the last minute due to illness. We suspect something is going around?
The junior event went well and thanks to Andrew Wainwright for his help - it wasn't as popular as would have hoped which we're suspecting is down to the location and most of the juniors decided to just play in the main congress. It's interesting to note that the average age in the open was in the 30's due to the high number of juniors in this section. Anyway, it's probably more than likely that we'll not hold a junior rapidplay next year and concentrate on the main congress instead and we're pencilling in an extra section ... watch this space. The dates for next year is likely to be the weekend 24th-26th October 2025 but we've not booked the Spa as yet so this is currently provisional.
All results are published on chess-results.com with the following links ....
Open, Major, Inter, Minor, Foundation.
The Junior Rapidplay was made into 2 sections with results on these links ....
Then we'll start preparing for next years event.