London Street Chess Is Booming
Back in August, in the height of Summer and good weather, I posted a blog about an initiative called the FourCorners Chess Club - You can find that blog here which also contains details of the meet-up.
To sum up the weekly meet-ups : On top of a mysterious hunk of granite in an unknown London square, a group of chess players decided to do something revolutionary with it - They decided to set up boards on the tables and play chess! (So brave). Joking aside, the weekly meet-up group is still going very strong. In fact, not too long ago, the club celebrated its one year anniversary, recognition from FIDE, 1672 followers on Instagram, a deal with Chessable and even had an appearance of a GM visiting the club!:
Paging GM Damian Lemos! A player who in the past has held World Champion Magnus Carlsen to a draw
The club still meets every Saturday from 12pm in St. John's Square, Farringdon, is free to play and open to all levels of player:
Two pictures to show the boom of the club. The first picture is from 47 weeks ago and the picture on the right is from a few weeks ago!
So is London Chess booming?
With a population of the city swelling to just below 9 million people and the boom of chess during lockdown, it would make sense that an initiative like this would be so successful. From my own experience, weekly attendance of either regulars/curiosity goers/ passers-by hits around 150 people per 3-hour session. I guess the thought of a free and fun activity every Saturday in a city that often steals all of our money is an attractive prospect - especially after a potentially crippling pandemic for some. It would be not far from the realms of imagination for another outdoor London street chess club popping up at some point in the future. A quick search on Google reveals that London is made of 40% public green space and there are around 3000 parks in 'The Big Smoke.' It is honestly shocking that something like this didn't exist prior to the Pandemic!
ThePawnSlayer and Chess Hustling
Quite often, it can be difficult for me to get a table to play due to the numbers of people in attendance. However, there is one table that I normally find myself sat at:
The Spectator board! The FourCorners most intimidating board!
A by-product of this club was the setting up of the London Street Chess YT Channel. This channel provides a chronicle of the misadventures that happen at the FourCornersClub (As well as recording other chess games in other coffee house clubs). Having only recently been set-up the channel stands at around 150 subscribers. Yet, they provide entertaining chess matches between the best players in London. The good news is that the hero of this blog has featured a number of times on the London Street Chess channel, showing off his brilliant flagging skills and dazzling blunders! I thought I would show you these videos and then analyse the terrible games that I ended up playing. The time controls for all of these games were 5+0 - Not my forte but I tried!
So there we go. I am 3-0 on the black side - Proof that I am now the best chess player in London (despite not even living in the capital!). If you think you can kick my ass at chess, come down and prove it every Saturday at 12pm in St. John's Square. I will be happy to give you a game (and maybe a lesson or two...).
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