Our traditional and ever popular pre-season tournament took place at the end of August, with 24 participants. It is a 5 round Swiss. Players get 10 miuntes +/- time depending on difference in grade (rating nowadays). The largest difference in time can be 16 mins to 4. This usually results in a few unexpected results but this tournament had far too many to mention all of them, as one by one the top seeds fell away.

Major upsets in round 1 included Derek Padvis beating Mike Barnes, Marian Talmacel defeating John Swain and Ken Heath getting the better of Brian Hayward. The shocks continued in rounds 2, 3 & 4. Frank Richmond, a rising star at the West Bridgford chess club, beat Graeme Jennings. Our own rising star, Nikolai Harrison, defeated John Huthwaite and Mike Naylor-Eade who also lost to Derek. Ben Poulteney beat John Swain. Most shocking of all though was Mike Barnes losing to Graham Gibson!

Pete Mercs went into the final round in the lead with 4/4, having avoided any slip ups, and got the draw he needed v Graham to win on 4.5/5. Graham finished joint 2nd on 4 points with Graeme and Frank, who beat Florian Biermann in the last round.

4.5 Pete Mercs
4.0 Graham Gibson, Graeme Jennings, Frank Richmond
3.5 Nikolai Harrison, Ben Poulteney
3.0 Boris Krastev, Mike Naylor-Eade, Mark Radford, Marian Talmacel
2.5 Mike Barnes, Florian Biermann, John Huthwaite, Derek Padvis, Andy While
2.0 Charlie Baylis, David Dunne, Keith Roper, John Swain
1.0 Albert Biermann, Brian Hayward, Ken Heath, Tom Pownall
0.0 Gary Hopkinson