Here are the pairings for the first round of the Club Championship:  as stated below, you can play OTB on Thursday night, or on chess.com before 6th Feb.

1. The format is a 7-round Swiss: due to unprecedented demand, we don’t have time for an all-play-all if we want to complete before the last IRL club night;

2. Time control is 30 minutes for all moves, with a 15-second increment;

3, The first round game can be played OTB at the club on Thursday night (25th January).  If you are unable to make this, please arrange with your opponent to play the game on chess.com – deadline date for completing the game and submitting the result to me is 6th February – instructions for setting up the games on chess.com are below.

Setting up games on chess.com

Time control is 30 minutes with 15 second increment, here are the instructions for starting the games…

1. Both players in the pairing log into chess.com before 7:45pm (or at an agreed date/time);

2. The player with the white pieces will set up the challenge: this is done as follows:

3. Click “Play” in left-hand menu and click “Play a friend”;

4. Type the black players username into the ‘Username or Email’ field – it should come up in a popup menu if you type it correctly 🙂

5. Select the username from the popup menu. Ignore any message about ratings difference.

6. Leave the first menu as “Standard”;  

7. Click the time control menu, then click “More Time “Controls”.  You can see fields to enter the custom time control -> then put min=30 sec=blank inc=15 – click “Ok” (LEAVE THE ‘sec’ FIELD BLANK – THIS IS NOT THE INCREMENT FIELD…)

8. Leave ‘Rated’ on, and ‘I play as…’ to white.

9. Now click ‘Play’;

10. The other player (black), should see the challenge come up on the Chess.com menu notifications at the top left-hand, just click the tick on this to accept and the game should start straight away.