Each year, Cumnor Chess Club holds two tournaments: The Players’ Cup and the Bill Laar Trophy.
The Players’ Cup is a competition between the strongest players at the club – predominantly Team 1 players. The Bill Laar Trophy is for the Team 2 players.
Previous Champions of the Players’ Cup
2007 Steve Bennett
2008 Gareth Stevens
2009 Scott Bower
2010 Scott Bower
2011 Gareth Stevens
2012 Mark Sayers
2013 Liam Glenn
2014 Simon Terrington
2015 Gareth Stevens
2016 Mark Sayers
2017 Daniel Varney
2018 Mark Sayers
2019 Eldar Alizada
2020 *Cancelled due to Coronavirus*
2021 *Cancelled due to Coronavirus*
2022 Nigel Moyse
Previous Champions of the Bill Laar Trophy
2015 Robin Carr
2016 David Sterrie
2017 Steve Bennett
2018 Robert Steel
2019 Robin Carr
2020 *Cancelled due to Coronavirus*
2021 *Cancelled due to Coronavirus*
2022 Robin Carr
The Coronavirus Pandemic
During the Coronavirus pandemic the club had to find a new way to keep going while we were unable to meet in real life. This meant going online. We held our first online evening on the 19th March 2020 and a “Club Night” was held every Thursday evening until 9th September 2021, when the club opened for the first time in 546 days. Lichess was the platform used for both friendly and competition play.
The rest of this page will follow the internal competitions during the pandemic if you want to check out how our teams got on check out the Our Teams pages.
With the 2020 Cups only just starting up in March 2020 and with a handful of games played it was decided to cancel them once we realised that the pandemic wasn’t going to over in a few weeks. The Club Nights on Lichess were friendly however Steve kept the score (3 points if you finished top, 2 for second and 1 for third).
The First Season ran from March 2020 until New Years Eve 2020
Simon 57 (number of points accumulated)
Nigel 39
Gareth 38
The Second Season ran from January 2021 until March 2021
Simon 16
Gareth 14
Mark S & Matt 7
The Third Season ran from April 2021 until June 2021
Simon 16
Joe 14
Mark S 10
The Fourth (and final) Season ran from July 2021 until September 2021
Joe 17
Gareth 15
Mark and Liam 10
Well done to everyone who played and in particular Simon who won 3 out of the 4. As you may have noticed the First Season was 3 times longer than the rest but it wasn’t until Christmas that we noticed that new people joining would struggle to catch the top players.