Month: April 2021

Linton Chess Club Online

It is now just over a year since playing over-the-board chess became impossible and we transferred our activities online. Initially we played internal club competitions, but seeking fresh opposition we joined the newly-formed Iceni (East Anglian) League in the early autumn of 2020. As of April 2021 we have 35 members in our online club on chess.com, and are the most active East Anglian club in online chess.

Iceni run both a rapidplay League (in three divisions) and a standard play individual championship. Our successes so far include our second team twice winning division 2 of the League, and our first team coming second once. In the individual championship both Chris Davison and Aarnavh Trivedi have won the top division once.

Perhaps our most notable success has been retaining the East Anglian Club Championship online that we won over-the-board in March 2020. There were five divisions, and Linton fielded teams in every division, giving opportunities for players of all standards to gain experience.

Currently we are continuing to play in Iceni competitions and hoping to be able to return to the chess club and playing face-to-face at the beginning of September, in time for the new season.

Patrick Ribbands

The Linton Chess Club is very sorry to report the death of Patrick Ribbands, who died at the age of 71 of a heart attack. He was a stalwart of Cambridgeshire chess for as long as anyone can remember. He played and captained teams for Linton in the Bury League for the past decade, and played a similar role for Royston in the Cambs and Herts Leagues. Before that he played for Cambridge City and was club president. He was a regular at local Congresses and also in the supporting events at the British Championships.

It will be as an indefatigable administrator that he will be best remembered and most missed. Among many other roles he captained the Cambridgeshire county second team for 30 years and was grading officer for 22 years. For the East Anglian Chess Union he was County Match Controller for 22 years and grading officer for 15 years. He initiated and ran the East Anglian Club Championship from 2008. At the time of his death he had just completed running this season’s event online. He had been Match Secretary in the Bury League.

Patrick was a kindly and gentle soul, who always made sure that there were plenty of opportunities for the lower-graded and junior players in events that he organised. He had a long history of coaching juniors, who have themselves paid tribute to the influence he had on them when they were starting out. He was always full of ideas, as evidenced by the Ribbands pairing system which he devised as an alternative to Swiss pairings, organising rapidplay tournaments to try it out! He will be greatly missed: as a club member always willing to fill a gap in the team sheet, as an organiser prepared to take most things on, and as a friend.

Paul Kemp