Beswick Library Chess Tournament

Chess Club was started at Beswick Library at the beginning of this year by staff member Jamie and has swiftly grown in size and popularity since then. In April, Jamie asked the regular attendees if they would be interested in a chess tournament and when this was met with approval from them, he came up with a plan. The tournament ran from Thursday 8 May – Thursday 26 June (excluding half term) and due to GCSEs, Jamie decided upon a league table format rather than a knockout tournament where players may be waiting weeks to play against an opponent. By contrast, a league with no limit on the number of games that could be played encouraged and rewarded players for attending and participating as much as they possibly could, and also allowed newcomers a chance to compete even if they had missed the first session or two. Instead of holding up the tournament, those who stopped showing up simply fell to the bottom of the table.

Over the course of the seven sessions, 30 players played at least one game as part of the tournament, all of whom are pupils at The East Manchester Academy. Before the first week of the tournament only 12 had signed up, so we saw the membership more than double over the course of the competition! A lot of this came from word of mouth from those participating in the tournament.

The battle for first place was between two boys David and Admire. David had never been a member of the chess club before and only joined in the second week of the tournament, and despite the fact he played less matches he had a very impressive ratio of wins to losses, having only lost one game (to Admire). Admire is friends with a few of our regular chess club members but had not really played the game seriously until we started the tournament. He showed a real commitment to both the tournament and improving his game since then however, staying for the full 2 hours and playing against anybody at all who will give him a game. He lost a fair few in that time to stronger, more experienced players, but also had enough wins to get a 4 point lead on David going into the final week.

After the final week, we had our winners! In first place was David (on the left with his gold medal and prize of a wooden chess set), followed by Admire in second place (in the centre with his silver medal and a box of Celebrations) and David’s brother Daniel came third (on the right with his bronze medal and a box of Maltesers)! David won around 6 games in the final session, at which point it was impossible for Admire to catch up, only losing one game in the whole tournament! Everybody seemed very pleased with their prizes and those who missed out still said they enjoyed the tournament; so much that we had many people asking if we would be running another tournament next year and even a request for some sort of chess event over the summer!

To add to this, earlier in the year Beswick Library’s Chess Club was featured in a display at Central Library with photos and testimonials from attendees provided by Jamie for the exhibition. Some of the featured quotes were as follows:

“It’s really fun to come by and play chess in the library. It helps me to improve my learning skill and to communicate with people too. It’s lots of fun as you challenge good chess players to improve yourself.” – Mercy

“I would say it feels the best to play chess after a stressful day since it helps with concentration and calmness, and moreover, it’s always fun to play with friends.” – Siham

Chess Club is on at Beswick Library Thursday 3-5pm, term time only.