We’re getting into the business end of the 2019 Frank Scott Shield, with only two players remaining on full points after three rounds.
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All posts for the month October, 2019
The O’Hanlon deliver a first whitewash of the season, while the BEA and Heidenfeld As both go toe-to-toe with promotion favourites.
There’s a free new site which can calculate a 7-game tablebase – i.e. the way to mate, if there is any, for every position with seven pieces on the board. It’s a useful guide for analysing endings, although it can come with a sting – so my final position against Ben in the club championships this year was winning, but it would have taken 44 moves until the next pawn move or capture (the site gives DTZ, or depth to zeroing, which is the number of moves until the 50-move rule resets), but I had already spent 8 moves without a capture or pawn move, so I would have been unable to win under the 50-move rule with best defence, including spite checks.
There are 423,836,835,667,331 legal 7-piece positions. This is around 100 times more positions than are available with 6 pieces – which were solved in 2005 – and around 100 times fewer positions than are available with 8 pieces, which of course will have much more depth to work out as well, so we won’t be seeing 8-piece tablebases any time soon.
The 7-game database takes up 18TB. By coincidence, 18TB hard drive were only invented last month, using microwave-assisted magnetic recording technology in a helium-filled drive.
There’s a strangely lopsided draw for Wednesday’s third round of the 2019 Frank Scott Shield.
We now have the full draw for next Wednesday’s second round of the 2019 Frank Scott Shield.
The Armstrong slump again, the Heidenfeld B go top, and the Bodley get underway – all the action from the past week…
Following from our previous look at a full head-to-head record in our Blitz Grand Prix, we’ve compiled the same stats for our senior club championships since its resurrection in 2014. There’s been six tournaments in that time, though the most number of times anyone has played anyone else is just three, which has happened ten times to date.
You can see all the individual records here
We’ll do one for the Frank Scott Shield too once this year’s competition is over, and links to all files will be in the links section of the site.
The club fixture list has been updated after changes to the O’Hanlon which I didn’t pick up on! In addition, North Kildare have withdrawn from the Bodley, and that match next March has been removed from the list. We will try get the Bodley an extra game or two over the season to make up for the Bodley South going from 10 to 6 teams in the past month!
The changes have given a little bit of room to space out the Frank Scott Shield and the Blitz Grand Prix a bit better. Round 2 of the Frank Scott Shield is next week, and round 3 will be on 23rd October. We’ll still have to try bring round 5 back from 18th December though.
The 2019 Frank Scott Shield – the strongest edition yet – got underway late last month with, as ever, the seeds not having it entirely their own way.
The O’Hanlon racked up a big win last week in their opening game of what promises to be a very competitive league.
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