Welcome to the 2026/27 season at Hendon Chess Club! I hope you all enjoyed the summer break, and are looking forward to another exciting year of chess!
Before I get to what’s new for the coming season, I’d like to start by congratulating Hendon member Lion Lebedev on his victory in the Major Open at this year’s British Chess Championships, which took place at Warwick University in August!
Lion took clear first place with a superb score of 8/9, winning a £1,200 prize, along with the Margaret Pugh Cup for the highest-placed junior. Very well done to him!
Now I’d like to let you know about a few changes for this season.
Firstly, we will be running a sixth team in the Middlesex League this season. Hendon Barnet Knights Juniors will continue to be our fifth team, so our teams will be Hendon 1–4, Hendon Barnet Knights Juniors, and Hendon 6.
Due to changes in the number of teams in each Middlesex League division this year, the third division will be single-round all-play-all instead of double-round. If we’d run five teams, as we did last season, we would only have had 57 League matches this season, around 20% less than last year. With six teams, we will have 67 matches and 432 team places – still slightly less than last year, but virtually the same.
Chris Rogal has agreed to captain Hendon 6 temporarily alongside Hendon 4, but we will be looking for a new captain for the sixth team. If you are interested, please contact me as soon as possible.
Secondly, our calendar will have a slightly different “shape” this year.
Over recent seasons, we have repeatedly heard from our members that they would like to see more non-League events at the Club, especially FIDE Rapid tournaments.
Previously, the problem was that our League matches had to be scheduled in a rather ad-hoc fashion: in pre-season, I had to contact all eleven of the other clubs in the Middlesex League, to find dates for all the fixtures we had to play. The constraints of other clubs and fixtures typically resulted in our home matches being spread across many evenings. Once our monthly Blitz is also taken into account, typically only a handful of dates were left free for anything else.
This year, I spearheaded an initiative to centralise the scheduling of Middlesex League fixtures. All clubs sent me their available home dates and constraints, and I used constraint solving software to generate the entire fixture list on a computer. This allowed the fixtures to be scheduled much more efficiently: currently, we have only 14 home match dates, down from 21 last season. That means a whole seven extra dates for other events.
I expect at least one or two of these will be taken up by rescheduled matches, as extreme weather, public transport problems and other unforeseen circumstances inevitably cause disruption during the season. But even so, we should still have much more flexibility than before. We have already scheduled FIDE Rapid tournaments in October and November, and we will be looking for good uses of the remaining dates too!
One trade-off which comes with this is that there will be a lot more evenings this season with three League matches taking place at once in our home venue. Thankfully, we have a nice big room, and there should still be plenty of space for social chess!
The final thing I’ll mention is that making our Club Championship FIDE-rated was a great success in 2026, and we plan to repeat that in 2027!
That’s all the news for the time being. Please keep an eye on our events calendar!