Scottish Championships 2024 Personal Report by Iain Sneddon
Scottish Championships 2024
8th to 14th July 24
Carnegie Conference Centre
Apologies, for late report, but I am just so busy at the moment and chasing my tail!
There were a few events on, but the main event was the Scottish Open Championship. The defending champion was the Dundee Chess Club stalwart and club legend, Ed Spencer! Ed was not favourite to win last year, but win he did in style, and became the Scottish Chess Champion 2023, a proud moment in his already amazing chess career!
It was always going to be tough to repeat that, and of course the other players were out to dethrone the king! Ed played well, but could not repeat his exploits of last year. Still, what a year, and what an honour! Three cheers for Ed Spencer (Dundee Chess Club)!
Below is a personal report from the only Castlehill Chess Club players in the championships, Iain Sneddon. I would like to thank Iain for doing this report and expect other players to follow suit if they play in any tournaments. All news is good news!
Over to you Iain!
The Scottish Open took place over 9 rounds from 8-14th July at the Carnegie Conference Centre in Dunfermline, familiar to those who have played in the SNCL. The event was generously sponsored by Kingsbarns Distillery, DM Pensions and Investment Solutions and Clarke Cottage Guesthouse.
There were 60 players in the Open, from 9 nationalities. I was the only Castlehill representative, though Alasdair Forbes and Steve Thomson attended the Weekend Congress, both scoring 2.5/5. There was a week day U1800 tournament running from Mon-Thurs over 7 rounds where TAFCA and Perth member James Graham came a very respectable 3rd in a strong field. I was not the only Dundee club representative however, the inimitable and then current Scottish Champion Ed Spencer was also there playing his usual brand of chess, Speelman-esque!
This was both my first Open tournament and also my first Scottish Championship, not bad for an old fella but I’ve waited too long to make this happen. It was an extremely enjoyable experience I have to say, very much ‘Eat, Sleep, Eat, Walk the Dog, Chess, Repeat’ for 7 days. I’m glad I took 2 byes on the double round days (Tuesday and Thursday), otherwise I would have been non-functional by Friday, it was really hard going. The standard of chess was pretty incredible, not mine of course, we had some incredible talent of all ages attending. Out of all the matches played only some 28% were drawn, which indicates the hard-fought nature of the games.
The tournament was won by IM Peter Large (ENG), though the new Scottish Champion is IM Andrew Greet (2nd) with FM Andrew Burnett a close 3rd. The grading prizes were all won by very impressive (and mostly under tall!) Juniors. Excellent chess was played by all these individuals throughout and congratulations to all of them.
https://www.chessscotland.com/news/scottish-championship-2024-winners
I’ll not give a round by round account, though I will provide a link to my blog if you want to see the games with some rather dubious commentary (my bits) assisted by the Compy (https://lichess.org/@/checkraven/blog/well-here-goes/zJHXQgQz). Suffice to say the highlight was being 2.5/3 and drawn against IM Stephen Mannion in Rd4 on Board 3. Needless to say, I got a nosebleed and plummeted back to my usual level from that round onwards. There was only one really disappointing game from my perspective, Rd5, though I made a bit of a schoolboy error against Stephen which was frustrating. After that the chess got better and I finished on my target score of 4.5/9, which seems pretty respectable to me. I was ranked 45th at the start of the tournament and finished 33rd, +50 rating points if the Chess Results site calculations are correct.
In summary I would recommend this tournament to anyone, it was well run in a pretty good spirit, though I understand it is a pretty significant investment in time. Looking back on it I really did have a good time, even if it took me till the following Wednesday or so to recover!