To All Members and Prospective Members

The Crowborough Community Centre is having a phased re-opening and is not ready to welcome us back in September and when we do return the English Chess Federation has quite a strict but not impossible Risk Assessment to complete.

This may entail social distancing, for instance hiring the main hall rather than the meeting rooms and playing on separate boards and calling out moves or other methods of safely playing.

Until the decision is made to return we have decided to re-open ONLINE as we were during March, April, May and June.

This will include;

·         Weekly meetings on Fridays 6:30pm-9:00pm on LICHESS and ZOOM. Similar format as before. These were popular with about 25 entries each week.

·         I will be running a training session for juniors teaching chess basics on ZOOM. I will consult on day and time but was thinking of Thursdays at 5:30pm. If there is a demand we may add an advanced class.

·         For the Under 16s we will continue to play a team in the Worldwide Junior event where at the end of last season we were promoted to Division A. This takes place on Saturdays at 4:00pm with Zoom commentary.

·         For the Adults and Juniors we will organise LICHESS online evening Team Events against other Sussex Clubs and of course our club KO Championship.

·         Members will be able to join the occasional Special Events such as commentary and participation in talks on world chess events similar to the successful David Howell talk.

·         If enough demand and I know not to everyone’s taste we will run variant chess tournaments and I may even organise an ULTRA BULLET championship !

We have some other ideas including adult beginner classes that may be of interest to parents or grandparents.

We are suspending our normal club membership fee structure though once we return to real life and if members wish to resume club meetings at the Community Centre there will be a pro-rata full club membership fee to pay.

However in the meantime we do have CLUB running costs for ZOOM, LICHESS, TROPHIES, BOOKWHEN, INSURANCE, WEBSITE and ongoing EQUIPMENT STORAGE costs.

We are therefore introducing an Online Membership for 2020 of;

Adults  £20

Juniors £10

Link to pay the membership fees on BOOKWHEN will be created shortly

For new members who are not sure how to play on LICHESS or have not used ZOOM before we are having a free club meeting this Friday  28^th August at 6:30pm when you can use these links.

Lichess  https://lichess.org/tournament/uT1NaAmU

if you have never used Lichess before you will need to sign up and create a free account

Zoom Link will be emailed out on Friday

you do not need to create a Zoom account to join the meeting though you may need to download a program file the first time you join a Zoom meeting.

Please note to follow Child Protection Guidelines these meetings will be recorded but never broadcast and only used in case of any complaint.

Any problems connecting on Friday please email and I will try to help.

I am creating a new mailing list for 2020-21 so please let me know if you wish an email address to be removed and/or a new email address added.