Bourne Chess Club hosted their first bingo fundraising event for the club on 31/07/2025

The event took place at the home of Bourne Chess Club, Wake House in Bourne. In an evening filled with fun and laughter, there were no less than 6 games called on the evening with cash prizes of over £100 being won. The event was well attended with Bourne Chess Club committee members and chess players, friends and family and members of the public.

Participants to the evening were greeted with a free glass of wine or beer and were offered a fine selection of cakes donated from generous families linked to the club. The refreshments for the evening were provided by Peter who won the “Most improved player” in the club’s trophy presentation evening for the season. He did a spectacular job on the evening of keeping all the bingo players fed and watered with his unique kindness and care.

Greeting attendees was Vice-Chair of the Committee Andy Redhead who has been a loyal member and always ensures all the events for Bourne Chess Club run smoothly. Assisting Andy was David Hemingway who was co-ordinating the bingo strips and raffle tickets on the evening. Bourne Chess Club would like to thank all of the participants on the evening, as well as the kind donations for all of the raffle prizes that were valued at well over £100.

In particular, the Bourne Chess Club Committee would like to thank Nic Willett from Kokoni Creative Workshops, based at Wake House, Bourne for her extremely generous gift donation which was the top raffle prize on the evening. The winner of this particularly special prize now gets the wonderful opportunity to meet Nic and enjoy some wonderful time being creative with some beautiful jewellery designs. Nic has been providing the most stunning jewellery at her workshop for years and is proving to be a valuable asset to the people of Bourne and beyond for her personalised workshop services – see here for more information 

Assisting Tom on the balls with the adjudication on the evening was Harrison Redhead who did a sterling job of verifying the wins for the bingo players. Harrison is himself an extremely able chess enthusiast and certainly an up and coming chess player in the making. Harrison successfully managed a large range of winners on the evening and along the way, everyone was having a lot of fun and laughter.

Harrison’s Dad, Andy Redhead, who is Vice-Chair of Bourne Chess Club said:

“A fantastic bingo evening was held in support of Bourne Chess Club, bringing together friends and supporters for a fun night—all while raising well over £100 for the club. Chairman Tom was on top form, calling the numbers and ensuring everything ran smoothly with his usual charm and unmistakable style. A big thank you to everyone who took part and helped make the event such a success! We had many requests asking us to organise another bingo evening – watch this space!”

To conclude the evening, David presented the Bourne Chess Club winner of the “Classical” section for season 2025 to Matt Bailey who received a large trophy and round of applause from the audience. Congratulations go to Matt for his success in the inter-league chess tournament.  This was a very pleasant way to finish off what was an extremely enjoyable evening of entertainment.

Big thanks are due from all the members of Bourne Chess Club to everyone who attended the first of what will hopefully be many other bingo nights. The kind and generous support offered to the club is very much appreciated and not taken for granted.

The Committee is also grateful for the support provided earlier in the season from the Len Pick Trust and Bourne United Charities.

There is a very useful feature on chess.com called Tablebase

There are times when you play an endgame, and you wonder whether it was possible to have changed the outcome. At the time, you will probably go over it with your opponent and the two of you will discuss the pros and cons of the position.

What you can do for positions that have up to 7 pieces remaining on the board, is re-create the position in the analysis section of chess.com, load it and then select the “Tablebase” option on the top right. It will then give you the current status of play: win, lose or draw if perfect moves were played from then on. You can then add the moves that were made at the time of your game and see if or when the status changes.

If this kind of feature interests you for your chess development then Bourne Chess Club is the place to come for your enjoyment of chess. Bourne Chess Club is playing in the Lincs and Cambs county divisions next season (2025/2026) and is continually looking for new members. For further enquiries please call Wake House on 01778 782224

Bourne Chess Club hosted their first open evening on 24/07/2025

We had two of our junior members attend, Alice and Ryan, to see how their club runs on a Thursday night and the Chess Up 2 was in full swing! Seen here are two visitors, Vlad and his son Alex who is 7 years old. Alex is being shown by Bourne Chess Club member Harrison how the Chess Up 2 helps even young players to play the correct moves by use of a traffic light display when you touch each of the pieces.

For newcomers to the game like Alex this type of hands on, experimental learning is beneficial as it facilitates active engagement, sensory learning with direct contact being made of all the chess pieces. For a beginner it gives them the chance to be involved in playing a game with another person, learning how the pieces move and all the time, playing logical, legal moves.  Alex and Harrison were having great fun together playing chess.

Bourne Chess Club welcomes people to come and play of all ages and ability. For further enquiries please call Wake House on 01778 782224

Bourne Chess Club has won the regional “4200” League Championship for chess season 2024/2025.

It was the first experience the club has had in entering competitive tournaments since the new opening of the chess club in March 2024. Bourne having a rich history of competitive chess play going back to the ’80s.

The “4200” League is run by Cambridgeshire County Chess Association and includes teams from:

Spalding, March, Peterborough, Godmanchester, St. Ives, and St. Neots

Bourne fielded no less than 12 of its members across the season, who were keen to start playing competitive chess. It was quite some achievement because the vast majority of the 12 had not experienced any competitive chess previously, so the club had to run practice sessions for using clocks, writing down moves and learning about general rules of chess for competitive matches.

The progress that members made through the season was really quite exceptional. Two members who stand out for making remarkable progress were Harrison, who managed to win on three occasions of being asked to play, at the grand age of 11, and Matt who on joining the club had to learn about notation and use of clocks. Credit also needs to go to two of the squad of 12 who were aged over 70.

The majority of the squad were not even registered with the ECF when the club was established at Wake House, Bourne in March 2024. But one of the key factors that assisted in the remarkable progress that the newcomers to chess made was their desire to learn and improve. Bourne Chess Club made use of internal communications within the club settings of chess.com and also created no less than 5 internal tournaments within the club (inter-league tournaments). These tournaments offered members a variety of different formats and time controls from rated blitz on the ECF LMS, to rapid-play on Swiss-Manager and Chess-results.com, to Classical at 50mins + 10secs.  Some of these tournaments required notation and use of clocks, and others neither. The result of this was a packed season of chess which was keenly fought out between members of the newly formed club and went a long way to recognising the expected requirements for competitive play in the external “4200” league.

Congratulations go to all Bourne Chess Club members for winning this superb trophy that now stands proudly at the club. In no particular order, well done to:

Ed Bailey, Harry Ingram, Cayden McKay, Tom Ingram, Peter Baldwin, Alan Stephenson, Matt Bailey, Sam Warner, Harrison Redhead, Aanjishnu Bhattacharyya, Ben Bennett, David Stanford.

No single player played more than 3 times in the season, an incredible team achievement that was not even nearly matched by any other club in the regional tournament. This willingness to play in the team for their club was a noticeable and very commendable attribute of the first year of competitive play for Bourne Chess Club.

Bourne Chess Club Honorary Member, Jason Dilley says:

A big “congratulations” to Tom Ingram and everyone associated with Bourne Chess Club on their first regional title. For a club that has been up and running for less than 18 months, with a group of individuals for whom the majority had never previously played rated matches, used clocks or annotated their games, this is a fantastic achievement.  Tom and the team have built a safe, friendly, welcoming environment for players of all ages and standards and, as an Honorary Member of the club with over 40 years of playing at a high level across the Midlands, I have witnessed some great junior talent emerging especially. Well done everyone – the opposition should be very wary of Bourne Chess Club in the upcoming season!”

Big congratulations to our Junior’s Chess Club members who have all passed their Level 1 exams.

Here we can see a sample of our proud juniors with their personalised certificates. The tutors involved in helping the juniors include: Sam, Cayden, Sarunas, Tom, David S and Tony. Bourne Chess Club is fortunate to have a pool of volunteer members, assisting under a Designated Safeguarding Officer who are able to present different chess ideas to the juniors. The club is also grateful to Justine who is a parent of two of the Junior members, as she has liased with the examination board, organising sourcing the exam papers, invigilation and also sending the papers off for external assessment.

Passing the test has been the result of a lot of hard work and dedicated practice by the Juniors. Key chess skills are being developed that include ideas about position, development, rules, thinking before moving, notation, tactics, and checkmates.

In no particular order, a big well done goes to:

Alice, Sasha, Sophia, Max and Ryan.

Sam who has been helping the Juniors said, “I am very proud of our junior members, they have all worked so hard and deserve their certificates. I hope they continue to make further progress in September.”