Chess Team wins at BUCA

Two weekends ago, Imperial College London’s chess club fielded three teams for the British University Chess Association championship (BUCA), coming away with two cases of silverware. The first team competed in the open competition, where the real title of British Chess Champion was competed. Captained by James Hookham, and including Alex Galliano, Veronica Foisor as well as Chess President Arijit Gupta – the team that had been seeded first – was expected to retain the title that they had won last year. However, several hurdles stood in the way of Imperial’s success. Over ten teams were competing, including formidable foes in Cambridge 1 and Edinburgh. However, after playing five rounds, all the worries of Imperial’s first team were proven to be completely unfounded, as a clean sheet of five wins was secured leaving the Imperialites with ten points out of a possible ten, and thus confirming them as British Chess Champions for the second year running. The Plate competition, which included Imperial’s second and third teams, was much less clear-cut. The second team, seeded first in this competition, consisted of first board Wan Mohd Fahzli, second board Boey Jin Huey, third board Shih Goh and fourth board, captain Luke Barron. Throughout the first few rounds, they routed their opponents, however a draw against main title contenders Birmingham did not bode well for the rest of the competition. However even after that setback, they team bounced back all the way to the last game, which seemed have been written in the stars, against Imperial’s third team. The third team, lead by Maximilian Eggl and fielding Alina Mititelu, Nikolai Rozanov and Ioannis Englezos, had traversed an easier path. After losing against Birmingham in their third game, they had gone from strength to strength and won all their consequent games. This led to the game of the two Imperials being quite significant in determining the final position of the two teams. In a show of selflessness, Imperial thirds lost their game securing Imperial second’s win in this competition, leaving them in fifth position in the standings. In addition to the team prizes, six Imperial players won board prizes for their outstanding play. These included Nikolai Rozanov, Veronica Foisor and Luke Barron. All in all, this was quite a success for the Chess club, and hopefully this can be repeated in next year’s competition. Read more in Luke Barron’s full report next week.