CCLA Bulletin Board Launched

The CCLA has recently launched its official online Bulletin Board and encourages all members and interested other parties to join and contribute, so as to foster the growth of CC in Australia and to enable the CCLA to continue to reflect the wishes of its members. A URL link for the board has been placed in the "Links" section of this weblog.

Merry Christmas from CCA!

I'd like to wish everyone a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year. Stay safe over the festive period and best wishes for 2006!

Olympiad Crosstables Online

The crosstables for the ICCF Olympiad XVII preliminaries are now online. Australia is in group 5 and startdate is January 10, 2006. The link to the crosstable is here.

Two Free Games at the ICCF!

ICCF has announced that free two game friendly matches against another ICCF Webserver member are on offer. This represents an excellent opportunity for anyone new to Webserver chess to take advantage of the service free of charge. The offer is available until the end of the year. A link to the ICCF Webserver is in the "Links" section of this website.

Australian Olympiad Team Announced

As Tim Runting has outlined in the International section of the latest ACCQ, Australia's Olympiad team has been announced. Boards 1-3 are three Senior International Masters (Steve Kerr, Tim Runting, and Gary Benson), board 4 is IM Bruce Oates, board 5 is Chris Fenwick, and board 6 is Clive Murden.

This lineup represents the pinnacle of CC chess here in Australia and statistically, as recent performances have demonstrated, represents a very realistic chance of success at the Olympiad. Good luck guys!

November ACCQ Out Now

The November issue of the ACCQ has arrived and marks a changing of the editorial guard. Dr. Graeme McIntyre has passed the editorial baton onto Shaun Press. Although my time in CCLA has thus far been short, I have always looked forward to receiving the latest ACCQ, with its news and results (both domestic and international), together with the well analysed Games section. A large part of this is (no doubt) due to Graeme's editorial work and I would like to thank him for his contribution to ACCQ.

On that note, it was pleasing to see that Shaun's first ACCQ at the helm continues on that high quality we have come to expect from ACCQ. Well done Shaun!

Peter Fenwick or John-Paul Leko?

As I was reading the Forum section of the latest New in Chess Yearbook (#76) I discovered, much to my surprise, a letter from John-Paul Fenwick in which he outlined crushing a hapless ICCF E-Mail Jubilee opponent (my words) via an innovation in the Breyer. It's nice to see Australian chess influencing play at the upper echelons of our fine game, as Peter Leko subsequently brought out the "Fenwick Variation" with a similar result against Nigel Short at Wijk aan Zee 2005. Nice work J-P!

NIC Yearbook #76 has a distinctly Australian flavour, as it also contains another letter (together with a nice photograph) from Max Illingworth.

We Won!

Photo from the SMH Photo Gallery.

I know this is completely non-CC but what an amazing (and IMHO completely deserved) victory by the Socceroos. We're off to Germany in 2006!