Marsh Towers: Project 30: 9th Mike Closs Memorial Tournament

Sunday 3 June 2018

Project 30: 9th Mike Closs Memorial Tournament - Report and Results

The 9th Mike Closs Memorial Tournament took place yesterday at Marsh Towers.

The games were wild and very tactical, thanks to the themed openings we used in each round.

The tournament preparation is complete

The players had to turn over a card to reveal their tournament number (which determined the order of play) but before doing so they had to name the people in the photographs and say what their respective connections to chess actually were.

Who are they - and what is their connection to chess?

We made a random draw before each round to determine which of the 12 nominated openings we would have to use. All were used by Mike many times.

The openings we used were...

Round 1

The Modern Benoni

Round 2

The Nimzo-Indian

Round 3

The French Wing Gambit

Round 4

The Milner-Barry Gambit

Round 5

The Sicilian Wing Gambit

The games were great!

Uniquely for this annual event, the players were all from the same club and essentially made up the double-winning Redcar A team (only Julian Allinson was unavailable).

Matthew Jackman

Andrew Smith

Dave Edmunds

David Baillie

Matthew and Andrew were making their Mike Closs Memorial debuts and former champion David Baillie maintained his 100% attendance record for this event.

The games were great fun and given the unfamiliar territory (none of the five players have had much experience using Mike's favourite openings) there were plenty of blunders but lots of brilliant moves and fabulous games too, as everyone fully entered into the spirit of the occasion.

After a full afternoon of dangerous play, the final scores were:

9.5/10: Sean Marsh

6/10: Dave Edmunds

5.5/10: Matthew Jackman, Andrew Smith

3.5/10: David Baillie