Variants and crash course

Since the first club night on September 8, we’ve been having a consistent club night every wednesday night. During the last weeks, we have been having tournaments in all kinds of variants of the game. First a hand-and-brain tournament, then a bughouse night, followed by a chess960 night. People got to know new ways to play the game, and also get to know the other members of the club! 

Hand-and-brain chess involves one player being the “hand”, and the other being the “brain”. This means that the brain names a piece (for example “rook”), after which the brain has to make a move with this piece. Bughouse is a variant played with four people on two chess boards. The gist is that if you capture a piece of your opponent, you pass it on to your opponent, who can then use it on his/her board. Chess960 is a variant where the pieces on the back rank are shuffled around in some random order before the start. This makes sure you can throw all your opening theory out of the window by move one, which leads to fun games as well!

After all the fun with the variants, we had a crash course in over-the-board chess last Wednesday. Most of our players got into chess online during the lockdown, and therefore they do not have any experience with chess tournaments in a real life setting. With the WLC weekend tournament which was coming up soon (just finished at the time of writing this), this was a great moment to give this crash course. Thomas Kools, an experienced player and member of the club, hosted this 30 minute crash course. After that, we held a small chess tournament (no variant this time), and finished with some room for free play. Different people show up every week, and also new members join every week. Let’s hope we can continue like this for a long time!