Surbiton Chess Club has a proud history in the 2020Chess tournament, having won the event in 2018.

2020Chess has currently gone online, as have many chess events in these strange times. It has also gone International.

In the current edition we have a Surbiton family team flying our flag, playing under the team name "Fircroft". The team members are Chris Briscoe, his wife Jo Durrant, his father-in-law Paul Durrant and brother-in-law Martin Durrant. Things were a bit crazy when the lockdown arrived and the Fircroft team entered the event a little late and were defaulted for the first two rounds. A little harsh I would say! Still, once they got to play chess, Fircroft notched up 3 consecutive match wins against university teams (Konstanz of Germany, Durham and Reading) before coming up against 4Knights who proved too good, despite Chris's two wins on top board. For some reason the results and tables are being posted on the ECF Forum rather than the 2020 website and so one has to wade through a couple of pages to see what is going on.

The final score for "Fircroft" in stage 2 of the event was 3.5 out of 6 match points which placed them 25th out of 84 sides taking part.

The next, third, phase of the tournament will apparently be stepping up in standard and has accepted dozens of invites from universities around the world. Good luck to Fircroft in their future matches! STOP PRESS: Next opponents are MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)!