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Latest News


33rd Nottingham Rapidplay

Capacity has now been reached. We are pleased to announce our that our annual Rapidplay will take place on Sunday, February 4th 2024 at our usual venue, Nottingham High School, starting at 10:00 am. This will be a 6 round Swiss system event, with five ECF rated sections. The basic entry fees are £20 for Adults and £15 for Juniors, whilst…

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Centenary Grandmaster Tournament: Report

The grand finale event to celebrate our centenary was a Grandmaster round-robin tournament in early November.  A range of invited English and overseas young stars competed against each other and against the established GMs in the hope of gaining title norms as well as valuable experience in a hard-fought event.  The venue was the Nottingham Mechanics Institute which proved to…

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33rd Nottingham Rapidplay

We are pleased to announce our that our annual Rapidplay will take place on Sunday, February 4th 2024 at our usual venue, Nottingham High School, starting at 10:00 am. This will be a 6 round Swiss system event, with five ECF rated sections. The basic entry fees are £20 for Adults and £15 for Juniors, whilst the prizes in each section…

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NCA Centenary Grandmaster Tournament

Top-level chess comes to Nottingham in early November when invited Grandmasters take on some of England’s best young players, including the cream of Nottingham’s chess talent.  It takes place from Monday 30 October – Friday 3 November. This special tournament is being organised to celebrate NCA’s centenary since its foundation and is the strongest tournament to be held in the County since…

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Derbyshire Congress

The inaugural Derbyshire weekend congress takes place 23-24th September, with sections for all standards of player.  Notts player are encouraged to support this new event on our doorstep.  Click on [Continue Reading] for a link to the Congress web site.

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Nottingham Chessfest 2023

NCA has celebrated its first 100 years with the first ‘Chessfest’, an open-air event held in Nottingham’s Trinity Square – and all involved agree it was a tremendous success.  An estimated 500 people visited the event during the 6 hours that we took over the Square, including lots of enthusiastic children, parents and many passers-by who stopped for a game…

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County Correspondence Team

The Counties and Districts Correspondence Chess Competition started on 14/4/23. Our team is in the Ward-Higgs, Division 1 section. Nottinghamshire team. 1 SIM Jonathan Tait 2419 2 CCM Gordon Anderson 2378 3 CCM Richard Webster 2361 4 CCM John Shaw 2322 5 CCE Phil Morgan 2232 6 Kevin Williamson 2120 7 Glenn Halfpenny 1800p 8 Andrew Robins 1800p We have…

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George Murfet and Len Morrell

Radcliffe and Bingham Chess Club has recently suffered the loss of two long-standing members of the Nottinghamshire chess community, both well known to generations of chess players in the area as teammates and foes over the board. George Murfet had early roots in the area and was an ‘old boy’ of Nottingham High School – from where I gather he…

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RIP Alan Morrey

Sadly we have lost another former pillar of the Notts Chess community. Alan was a valued member of the Sutton/Ashfield and Rainworth clubs for many years and held NCA posts, for example publishing the monthly Notts Bulletin in pre-website days. We hear that he passed away on 14/02/2023, aged 87 years old, and the funeral will take place, 3.00 pm…

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46th Nottingham Congress

We are pleased to announce that the Congress will take place on the weekend of April 15th & 16th at our usual venue, Nottingham High School. It will be a five round, ECF-rated, standard play Swiss, with five sections. Full details of the event, the entry form and access to online entry are available on our Competitions page.

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32nd Nottingham Rapidplay

We are pleased to announce our next tournament, the Rapidplay, to be held on Sunday 29th January 2023 at Nottingham High School, our usual venue. The main details, such as the rating limits for the five sections, can be seen on our competitions page, where a downloadable entry form with all the details can be seen. There is also a…

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Revised League Fixture List

A new version of the fixture list for 2022-23 has been posted via email to all club secretaries and team captains.  The new version includes additional teams in division 4 and division 5. It also includes fixtures for the new rapid play ‘Minor League’ which is intended to give juniors and those new to league chess an opportunity to play competitive…

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Nottinghamshire County Championships

Nottinghamshire players, past and present, are invited to enter the County Championships on Sunday 13 November at Bramcote Memorial Hall. The NCA Annual General Meeting agreed with the Tournaments Committee’s proposal to run a six-round Rapidplay in the hope that this new format may attract larger numbers of players and also help to celebrate the NCA’s centenary year in style.…

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Best Games and Swindles

With the return of “over the board” chess also comes the chance to show off your best efforts. Any games played in NCA tournaments (Rapidplay or Congress) league or county teams in the past 12 months are eligible. There are prizes for best games (open and under 1800 sections) and also for your best swindles. Please send entries to me…

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Future Events

The latest edition of the Junior Newsletter is now available on the Juniors page. It includes details of several upcoming events suitable for Juniors. We are also looking for views on the format for our County Championship later this year. Please take a look on the competitions page

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Nail-biter in NG9

On 26th February, our Notts u1450 juniors hosted Leicestershire u1450 for a winner takes all clash at Bramcote. A good natured and well fought match, prefaced with Leicestershire’s captain and a couple of their players kindly helping us with setting up some of the tables and boards. As the match started, it quickly looked like a lot of the games…

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31st Nottingham Rapidplay

In view of the continuing uncertainty about Covid developments, we cannot yet be absolutely certain that the event will be able to go ahead. However we have decided to start taking entries, which will be limited to a maximum of 150 in total. A full update on the current situation can be seen on the Tournaments tab of our Competitions…

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Correspondence Chess

The 2021 season has now been completed. Nottinghamshire finished in third place in Division 2 of the Counties League competition behind, East Wales B and Yorkshire A. You can view the full Results here The 2022 season will begin in February. If you are interested in playing for Nottinghamshire in this competition, please contact Phil Morgan, County Correspondence Captain before…

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4NCL Online Season 4

Our team went down to a narrow defeat by 1.5 – 2.5. Martin Pettinger maintained his unbeaten record with a draw on Board 1. Alex Bentley scored an excellent win with black on Board 2. However Eagle and Child powered home with wins on the lower boards in tense finishes that went down to the wire. The match result was…

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31st Nottingham Rapidplay

We are currently planning to hold this ECF-rated event on Sunday 20th February 2022 at the usual venue, Nottingham High School, starting at 10:00am. However, in view of the current uncertainty about Covid developments, we cannot yet confirm this or start to take entries. Hopefully circumstances will allow us to do this in early January. Meanwhile, the currently expected details…

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4NCL Online Season 4

Ashfield Anonymous C has progressed to the Final of Division 4 of the 4NCL Online with a 3-1 win over Hertford 2. We reached this stage by winning our League section, scoring 13/14 points. Our top board, Martin Pettinger, has won his 8 games in this season’s competition. The Semi-Final was a new and daunting experience for the team as…

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Tom Guy (d.19 July 2021)

We were sad to learn of the death of Tom after a long battle with cancer. He was active in the Notts area in the 1970s and 80s, being a regular for the Nottingham Players club before moving to West Bridgford CC in 1975. He also represented the County both over the board and in correspondence chess, continuing to do…

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Season 2021-22

Following the request for volunteers to captain teams, our thanks to David Levens, Mick Frings and Mike Swanwick, who will captain Notts U2050, U1450 and U1450 Juniors teams. The following details were supplied by Peter Sherlock, MCCU County Championship Controller… U2050 section – only Nottinghamshire have entered and will go through to the National Stages as MCCU1. Entries for this…

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Volunteers Needed!

Following the recent online AGM there are three areas in particular where the association needs volunteers to step forward to help us get chess back on the board! Executive Committee – There are two vacancies for EC Members. If you have any ideas on how to develop chess in the county, this is the ideal place to put them forward.…

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Correspondence Chess

Congratulations to our team captain, Phil Morgan, who has achieved the title of Welsh CC Expert.He provided an update on this year’s team, which is currently participating in Division 2 of the County Correspondence competition. The event started late, in February 2021, so will officially end in January 2022.At the end of June, we stood in first place on 10…

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Notts League Update

Due to Coronavirus restrictions the 2019-2020 season was suspended in March 2020 with most teams having two or three matches still to play. It was hoped that these could be completed later in the year when allowed, but (as restrictions went on) the LMC eventually decided to end the season with proportional points allocated for those remaining matches.

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