Cambridge Junior Chess & Go Club

Club News

This is our latest information as of autumn 2015.

Our club is still meeting St Augustine's Hall, Richmond Road, Cambridge CB4 3PT.

Our meetings are on Wednesdays during term time from 6pm until 7.30pm. The cost is £1.50 per week. There is car parking on the street.

Our club is now more than 20 years old! We usually have around 20 junior players at the club.

The Chess Shield and Go Shield competitions will continue to be held in the autumn and/or spring. The winner of each will keep the trophy for the next six months. The current champions are Michael Lin (Chess) and Edmund Smith (Go). The champion in the junior age bands for both Chess and Go was were Alexander Hsieh. For information about past winners, see the Roll of Champions

Occasionally we also have club championships of Oware, Shogi, Chinese Chess and Othello. The latest winners were David Robson (Chinese Chess) Simeon Bott (Shogi) Greg Briscoe (Oware) and Claudia Bazyk (Othello).

Each year we hold heats of the UK Chess Challenge and the UK Go Challenge.

Club Details

The Junior Chess & Go Club was founded in its current form in 1994 as a partnership between the Cambridge City Chess Club and the Cambridge Go Club and this continued until 2013. Recently the City Chess Club decided they did not want to be associated with the junior club any more, but the Go club has continued to be involved.

The club is a place for children of all ages to come and play chess and go (if you don't know what go is, look here for a quick introduction to the game, or download igowin, an excellent free go-playing program - size 786k - which runs under Windows and includes a go tutorial). Go is somtimes known as igo (the Japanese name for the game), weiqi (the Chinese name), wei ch'i (the Cantonese name) or baduk (Korean).

We are always very pleased to have new members at our club. Our club members over the past few years have mostly been aged between 6 and 16. These have included beginners and also quite strong players. So if you come along, you should be able to find someone who is about the same standard as you are. It doesn't matter whether you come every week or just now and then. And it doesn't matter if you can't stay until the end.

On ordinary meetings, when we do not have any special events, we usually have either some Chess teaching and then a game on our Go ladder, or else some Go teaching and then a game on the Chess ladder.

Activities

These are some of the things our club does:

• Twice a year we have a Club Chess Competition and a Club Go Competition. The winner of each one has their name engraved on a shield which they keep for six months. Have a look at the list of recent winners.
• Each year we run a heat of the UK Chess Challenge. and the UK Go Challenge
• We send out club news by e-mail. As well as information about the club, it often has details of other chess and go events.
• There are chess and go books which you can borrow and some puzzle sheets which you can keep.
• You can get information from us about chess and go tournaments, Chess and Go coaching, and about other clubs.
• Sometimes we have organised Chess Congresses and Go Tournaments, usually held in Milton.
• There are also some other special events which we arrange. These have included several simultaneous displays, one of them by Harriet Hunt, then the Women's Junior World Chess Champion.
• As well as Chess and Go, we have some sets at the club to play Othello and also Oware, a traditional game from Africa. For more on Oware, see the UK Oware Society web pages.
• We have some sets for, and information about, Chinese Chess and Japanese Chess.

This page is maintained by Paul & Andrea Smith. If you would like any more information, please e-mail us.

If you would like more information about chess and go clubs, events and services in the UK, then go to the English Chess Federation and British Go Association web sites.

We welcome any ideas about how to improve this page or our club, or any offers of help!