Results from the Bury St Edmunds Chess Congress

Last weekend 156 chess players visited the Apex to play in the 36th Bury St Edmunds Chess Congress; one of the top weekend chess congresses, if not the best weekend congress, in the country.

Organisers and helpers setting up the tournament hall early on Saturday morning.

The five round tournament consists of four sections: Open, Challengers, Inter and Minor. Anybody can enter the Open event which regularly attracts some of the country’s top players, including GM Matthew Sadler in recent years. This year four International Masters competed: Richard Pert, Adam Hunt, Dagne Čiukšytė and Neil Bradbury, who recently made a come back from a number of years out of the game.

Below is the list of winners from each section, which included four Suffolk players highlighted in bold. The full list of results is available from the Bury St Edmunds Chess Congress website.

Open: IM Richard Pert (Brentwood) and IM Adam Hunt (Woodbridge School) – 4/5.

Challengers: Peter Finn (Wycombe & Hazlemere) – 4½/5.

Inter: Andrew Donnelly (Bury St Edmunds & Sudbury) and Jerzy Cholewinski (Ipswich) scored 4½/5.

Minor: Nina Pert (Brentwood) and Chris Shepherd-Rose (Bury St Edmunds) scored 4½/5.

Congratulations to Adam, Andrew, Jerzy and Chris!

The congress also gave out a number of other prizes such as vouchers for chess.com subscriptions and the Bob Jones Trophy (awarded to the highest-scoring junior playing in the Bury League or Suffolk League from the highest section in which a score of 3 points is achieved), which this year was won by Julia Volovich (Cambridge).

There were a number of other fantastic performances from Suffolk players, including Jon Collins, Mark Le Vine and Bob Jones, but probably the most outstanding performance went to James Pack. With an ECF grade of 136, James managed to scored 3½ points with an ECF grading performance of 180!

Steve Lovell, Congress Secretary, would like to thank all those who helped make the event what it was. There are too many to name without risking accidental omission (and making for rather dull reading). Suffice to say, we really appreciated everyone’s input! We had a great weekend, and are already looking forward to next year’s event. I hope you are too. You can put it in the diary now: it’ll be 26th and 27th October 2019.