Keith Gregory (pictured above) has kindly sent us this round up of the ever popular weekly Wessex Online tournaments.
As 2022 comes to an end I feel this is a good time to look back on the long-established lichess “Weekly Wessex Swiss” tournaments and do an end of year summary….the tournaments are all 5-rounders and played at 5 mins + 5 seconds increment move rate. They typically wrap up by 21:00 – 21:30 depending on how many “epic games” get played – we do get the odd one that goes over 100 moves !
The players feature both Wessex OTB & Wessex Online regulars and also a few “friends of Wessex”, (notably Steve & Rose Saunders from Chandlers Ford club who have been frequent flyers throughout the year). With a good number of “regulars” we routinely get 10+ players which allows the Swiss system to do its thing so the stronger players and the weaker players all get some competitive games, along with the occasional upset where a 2300+ player gets taken out by a much lower graded player – this happened literally this week with Tom Philidor (2005) beating a very experienced 2366.
Over the 53 tournaments held this year a total of 63 different players have played once or more so there’s a constant change of line-up.
The 10 “regulars” (who have all played 25 or more tournaments in 2022) are Richard Allis, Keith Gregory, Tom Philidor, David Pye, Jamie Chilton, Franz Pittman, Allan Pleasants, Steve Saunders, Rose Saunders and Manuel Herrera.
Looking at those who have taken the top spot, we have had 12 different winners across the year.
The runaway “winner of winners” is Richard Allis (pictured below) with a remarkable 15 wins, followed by Jaimie Wilson with 7 wins and Allan Pleasants / David Pye with 6 wins.
Other winners include Keith Gregory (5 wins), Oscar Garcia (4 wins), Peter Anderson (3 wins), Rolandas Lukosius /Tom Philidor (2 wins) and Reenen Du Toit / Iwan Cave / Richard Ursell with 1 win each.
7 players have managed the impressive feat of 5 wins from 5 games, including Allan Pleasants (twice), Tom Philidor, Richard Allis, Keith Gregory, Jaimie Wilson, Peter Anderson & Oscar Garcia.
To illustrate how tough the tournament is to win, we had at least one 2300+ player in 39 of the 53 weeks.
Tournament #121 (on 5th August) saw 4 of them in action… Oscar Garcia (2351), Rolandas Lukosius (2314), Peter Anderson (2308) and David Pye (2354)
- Luckily, they all beat each other and I managed to stumble over the line to win it with 4.5/5 and a relatively modest 2584+ result.
Whilst it has been fairly routine for the podium players to notch up 2600+ results, the last two tournaments of the year also saw our two highest performance results of the year (and previous years too!)
Oscar Garcia (pictured below) notched up an awesome 2759 result in winning #142 on 21st December before Allan Pleasants nearly matched him with a 2697 result in #143 on 28th December. Both these performances will take some beating!
I’d like to conclude by thanking all those who have participated and encouraging anyone else who fancies trying it to contact me via lichess.org – I am KeithDFG.
All the tournaments are played in a very friendly and supportive atmosphere and all are welcome to join us. There’s no money involved, just a bunch of chess mates kicking pawns around each week 😊
I hope to see many of you online/OTB in 2023.
Happy New Year !
Keith Gregory, 4NCL Online Wessex Captain, December 2022
