Wednesday 15 January 2020

The best game prize

Offering best game prizes is now a thing of the past. It is both a victim of the increased computerisation of chess ('Engine says no!'), and the modesty of most chess players. This wasn't always so.
During the recent Australian Championship I was tasked with a bit of detective work. Steven Hemsley asked me if I could find a game of hist from the early 1990's. It was played in a Correspondence Chess event, and it won a best game prize for Category 4 players. I did a bit of digging in my random boxes of old chess magazines, and discovered it in 1995 edition of Australian Correspondence Chess Quarterly. Also of interest was that it was one of half a dozen games that had been submitted in that category, and that 36 games were submitted across all sections. Unfortunately numbers in subsequent years fell from this level, until the CCLA decided to stop giving Best game prizes a few years ago.


Hemsley,Steven - Sutton,J [B09]
QT C CCLA, 1993


No comments: