This Year: Canterbury

Canterbury seemed, to a rare participant, to be an above average venue for the British championships:  a nice town with a decent playing hall and reasonable accommodation available at the university.  The main drawbacks seemed to be the failure of the university to open any restaurants during the weekend, a move which cost them a lot of money as well as causing considerable inconvenience due to the lack of other options nearby.  Failing to keep the bar open on the last night as they had done on other occasions was probably also not financially astute.  During my longest stay on a campus my main problem was the extreme temperature in my room, until I managed to circumvent health and safety by acquiring the requisite Allen key to open the window more than a crack my room closely resembled a sauna.

Some of my games have already been annotated for the Telegraph, and others will appear in BCM and Chessbase but I will mention an interesting moment in my game with Richard Pert in the third round. We had both spent a bit of time in the opening which left the beaten track early on.

I again failed to collect the British trophy as, like a lot of my openings, it was in for repairs.  I haven’t actually got hold of it since 1989, as last time I shared the title with Matthew Sadler in Hove I asked if he wanted to take possession of the trophy and he did an excellent job of looking after it.

I did receive the relatively new Tony Miles English Championship trophy.  This felt a bit weird as at the aforementioned event he was one of the players involved in the playoff.  Tony was an inspiration to me when I was young and it was nice to see his massive contribution to English chess acknowledged with this new trophy.

To finish on a lighter note I thoroughly recommend the cricket match held on the free day which was strangely bereft of spectators despite being held not far from the main accommodation.  I watched most of the ECF XI successful run chase which provided a lot of entertainment both in the play and acceptance or lack thereof of umpiring decisions!