30th April 2008 --- EUROPEAN CLUB CUP 2008

The 24th European Club Cup (Open) and the 13th European Club Cup for Women will be held in Kallithea,Halkidiki,Greece on October 16th-24th. Rates of play are 40 moves in 90 minutes and 30 minutes to finish game + 30 seconds increment per move. The playing hall is at the Athos Palace Hotel, one of three official residents for the players, the others being the Theophano Imperial Palace and the Macedonia Sun.
The clubs representing Wales this year will be Nidum (champions) and Cardiff.



9th April 2008 --- South Wales Evening Post Chess Column.

Our editor of the South Wales Evening Post column, Rej Jones has been hospitalised recently, and is undergoing a rest period.Hence, no column, and no update of the West Wales Chess scene, for the next few weeks.

I, and many others alike, hope Rej makes a full recovery soon – without his expertise in media and grading, the WWCL scene is non-existent.

Get well soon, Rej !









31st March 2008 --- The un-Reported First Deathmatch.

I’m sure all your nature lovers out there caught this amazing story recently.

Nature’s Struggle Ends in a Deadly Draw

But what most of you are probably unaware of is the fact that this is not the first time in nature that an incident such as this has occurred, merely the first time it has been reported.

The first such ‘clash’ between two heavyweight predators took place 17 years ago in woodlands near Resolven, Neath. There, three eyewitnesses saw a large brown mountain bear wrestle with an unidentified, yet clearly bear-like creature. On this occasion though, unlike the recent story above, the victorious bear-like creature did not burst upon ingesting its mountain bear foe.

Upon hearing the amazing account of this story from the eyewitnesses, surprised, yet excited Park Rangers, with help from leading scientists, actually managed to track the bear-like creature down to, Neath Liberal Club! Where, upon approaching the bear-like creature, the biggest shock of this incident was to come. As they found the bear-like creature was actually playing chess!

Naturally, all the scientists were dumbfounded by this discovery, and immediately proclaimed this bear-like creature to be the missing link in man’s evolution between human and animal. As it was obviously in possession of extraordinarily higher brain functions, and therefore must have immense mental capabilities.

But then one of the scientists at hand pointed out that the bear-like creature was actually playing the Colle-Zukertort, and had blocked his bishop in behind his own pawns again. This was then quickly accepted as incontrovertible proof that the bear-like creature did in fact only possess a regular bear-like brain, and had no more intelligence that a normal common brown bear.

And this disappointing fact is the reason why the story never got reported. Since who wants to hear about a bear that can randomly move chess pieces around, when you can see bears do much cleverer tricks than that at any regular circus.



30th January 2008 --- Thieving Albanian Gypo’s

I hope all the Nidum members caught this story. Fecking Albanians, coming over here and trying to swipe all our hard earned dosh.

Thieving Albanian Gypo News