Worcester & District Chess League

2014-5 Ball Cup: Tony Shaw wins

2014-5

The Ball Cup is a trophy for the best league player graded under-150. Entry was free for anly player of a club affiliated to Worcester & District Chess League. You can see the names of previous winners since 1947 on the roll of honour.

The preliminary rounds were run as all-play-all tournaments for two pools of players and every entrant got at least four games. The winners of the pools competed in the knock out stages.The arrangements are shown below

• Two all-play-all groups of 5 players each;
• The winner and runner up of each group qualify automatically for the knockout phase;
• The knockout phase constituted semi-finals and final.

Knock-out stages

The semi-finals - Tony Shaw (Malvern) v David Smith (Redditch) and Matthew Jordan (Malvern) v Ray Collett (Worcester City). Collett and Jordan drew their first game and replayed on 23 Apr with Jordan winning to take his place in the final.

Final - Tony Shaw (white, Malvern) - Matthew Jordan (black, Malvern) Colours were determined by the number of wickets taken on the second day of play in the Worcestershire-New Zealand match played at New Road. The first game was a draw played on 29 May. In the second game Tony triumphed with the black pieces.

Group stage

26 Mar, Andrew Farthing, controller reports. Both groups saw a clear winner, followed by a tie for second place, necessitating use of the tie-break methods set out in the competition rules. Any tiebreak method - apart from a play-off - is inevitably arbitrary to some degree, so particular sympathies go out to those who were unfortunate enough to lose out in this instance.  Giles Stanton was especially unlucky this year, coming out on top under two of the three tiebreak methodologies stipulated in the rules but not under the one which came first in the defined sequence.

12 Mar. Andrew Farthing, controller reports. In Group A, there is everything still to play for, and a close finish looks certain. David Smith has guaranteed passage to the semi-finals. The other place will fall to either Matthew Jordan or Richard Collett.