County Championship UK & Ireland Live

And thanks to Leinster for a testing match. Yes, it was good to see a good turn out on both sides. That seems to have got better as the season has progressed. 

Well done to all teams and thanks very much for taking part. I will be collecting all the results and making a formal announcement by the end of the week  

Final Scores:

Team Cambridgeshire 5

Team Sussex 8

Hertfordshire County Chess 1 - WD

Norfolk Knights 14

Kent Checkmates 10

Munster 7

Lancashire Lads and Lasses 5

Leinster 6

Thank you so much for arranging this. It was great fun.

Yes, seconded. Many thanks Donna. 

Yes I thoroughly enjoyed playing and arranging it 😊 don’t forget to sign up to the next season. 

Put Kent down as interested, please.

Please sign up in the new thread which I think you have done already 😊

Yes, same here, thank you Donna.

A big thanks to Donna for organising the live league. It's never easy getting something new off the ground and the effort is much appreciated.

Since we've reached the end of the season, I thought it might be worth sharing my 2 cents on the experience and comparing with everyone else.

(!!) The Good:
- The concept of the live league in general. It's the closest thing to replicating IRL club play and a nice addition/alternative to the daily tournaments that dominate most chess.com club games.

- The speed with which you can crack through a season is refreshing, since if things don't go well there's always another chance at a redemption/comeback in a week or two. There's a tension and greater immediacy that makes it more exciting.

- The tightness of the league table results. Even towards the end it seemed like (almost) anything was possible with regard to the final standings, which is great for keeping things interesting.

(?!) The Variable:
- Flexible Scheduling. I still don't know what I think of this. On the one hand, I can see that with so few players on each team, you want to give them the ability to maximise the number of players they can field. On the other, it makes organising each match far more time consuming for the admins and, from the players point of view, the lack of routine could be an impediment to getting involved. The knowledge that there's always a live league match on, for example, Tuesday evenings, makes it far easier to remember and reserve time for(!?), rather than having to keep up with sporadic news announcements that I suspect many players ignore the bulk of. I also know that I wasn't alone in forgetting about a match on the night and having to forfeit .

- Match Ups. This essentially comes down to the size of the clubs, the percentage of members who are actually actively involved, and therefore the number of players a club can field for a match. IMO, as a club you want to be able to offer your players well matched games (+/-100 points of their rating) for them to play. I can't remember exactly, but I feel like we had quite a few matches where the rating discrepancy between players was large enough that the outcome was either a foregone conclusion, or was going to be decided by a single pairing. I appreciate that the nature of competition means that sometimes you're just going to be outclassed, but when your players are sitting at home at their computers deciding between playing a regular random live game or getting thrashed, they'll likely choose the former.

(?) The Not So Good:
- Recruiting players. Oh lordy. From an admin perspective I found this to be quite the difficult chore. I don't know if it affected everyone but for Munster it was almost always a nail biting climax in the last few minutes before registration closed to see if we'd be able to pull the numbers in time. For a daily match, you at least have a running total and can do targeted recruiting closer to the start date if you're lacking in an area, but for this you're necessarily in the dark until the last minute. Hats off to the Norfolk Knights who seemed frequently able to pull together a very respectable turnout.

I'd be interested to hear how each of the admins managed their recruitment to compare what worked and what didn't make a difference. Maybe it's just down to numbers. We have a bit short of 200 members but I'd say only a few dozen at most are actually active within the club.
I did a news post a week or two in advance (at the time of organising the match), and then a reminder a day or two before and/or on the day itself. Asking people in advance to voice their intention to play was usually met with silence, or the odd person saying they were interested and never turning up on the day. Towards the end of the season, I noticed that notes on the club homepage during the 1 hour registration period seemed to be a decent method of getting people signed up. It was only ever 1 or 2, but when you're fielding a mere 3-4 players, it's a significant percentage.

So like I said, that's my 2 cents. I know a lot of it is outside anyone's control and I hope it's taken in the constructive spirit it's intended. Again, a big thanks to Donna and every other admin that organised for their clubs. 

@Liam315 thank you very much for your feedback and it is taken on board but I would love to hear from others too to see how you all did  

First of all a big thanks to Donna for organising a successful first season of the County live league.  Starting something for the first time is never easy.   The Norfolk Knights enjoyed the competition and it was popular with the members from our club who enjoy the live rapid play time control.  

I think Norfolk’s success in this competition was down to the fact at the start of the first lockdown in March last year, lots of the county’s over the board players joined the club for the first time looking for somewhere to play chess and we started offering live matches and tournaments on a weekly basis.  Our numbers went from under 50 members to the present total of 135.  Understandably, a lot of the clubs in the county championships only attract daily chess players but the Norfolk Knights team now has a mixture of players; some who will only play daily, some who will only play a live and those who will do both.   So maybe a way forward to other teams, if you haven’t already, is to make contact with their county chess  association and offer some regular live chess events.  

I agree with Liam, a regular time slot would be helpful for recruiting players.  Then players know when the next match will be can commit a lot easier.  I think there is the potential to have much greater numbers of players in each match.  In the ECF online county championships the teams were regularly putting out teams of 10+ players.   They got round the uneven match ups by having rated sections, but we will need much greater numbers before this can happen. 

I think another  way of getting more players to play would be if the team admins could contact each other a few days before the match with a team list, we are managing to this in our live league we have in East Anglia.  It’s not always a 100% accurate but it gives us an idea of how many players each team will have and their strength.  We also will try to find an extra player or two if the other team has more.  

Again a big thanks to Donna, the team admins and everyone who took part.   We will look forward to season 2. 

All the best

Matt

Thanks for the feedback Matt