GeoChess : 2014.Dec : London : Rook Edition

This is part of a monthly tournament series designed to produce fair games for players with ratings under 1275. In this edition, I've moved the number of games per group up a bit. 

For the December 2014 edition, there is a 37.5% advance rate with large groups (8(2)->3)and so you'll begin with 14 simultaneous games (double games).  The time control is 48 hours per move. Only players with more than 100 games, less than an average of 6 hours per move, and less than a 2% time-out rate may join. There is no vacation time. These rules are in place to weed out some of the less serious players, prevent timeouts and year-long games, etc.

This tournament scheduled to begin at midnight, chess.com time (Pacific US time, GMT-8) on December 15, 2014.  Once that time passes, I'll wait for the tournament to fill up.

There is no autostart in this tournament and it will not start earlier than the appointed time on 15.December.

On the evening of December 14th, a few hours before the tournament starts or shortly before the tournament starts, I'll remove players who look like they are "gaming" their score or whose score exceeds 1300.  The point of removing players rated over 1300 is merely to keep the playing field reasonably even.

Good luck and enjoy the games!

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I've decided to make the trophies more interesting by making these parallel to the "GeoChess" series I've started. I’ll continue to schedule these on the 15^th of each month.

This month's tournament and trophies pays homage to the city of London (the one in England, not the one in Canada... maybe next time. ;-)

The next one (2015.Jan.15) is themed arould Oslo.  I'll send everyone in this tournament an invitation around 08 January.

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Map of the UK showing London. (Source: Wikipedia)

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London at night (source: Jason Hawkins, via IBT)

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London's iconic subway map (source: BBC)

This is the full resolution of the trophy image, drawing from London's coat of arms.