The 2024-25 Northumberland Individual Championships are under way, with a total of 62 players set to battle it out over the next seven months for the coveted Zollner, Sell and Gilroy trophies. This is an impressive entry, up some 50 per cent on previous years and underlining the welcome increase in chess activity on Tyneside in the last few years.
As any sports fan will tell you, in Cup Finals underdogs often rise to the occasion and defeat the favourites. In the Northumberland Summer Chess Cup Final, Forest Hall Badgers pulled off an impressive giant-killing act to defeat Morpeth A, while Gosforth Regents defeated their club mates Gosforth Centurions in the Plate Final.
The Northumberland Weekend Congress celebrates its 60th edition later this month at the Parks Leisure Centre, North Shields. Over 130 players are expected to compete for a total of £2,200 in prizes.
The Northumberland Summer Cup and Plate’s 22 teams have been whittled down to just four for the Finals, which take place on Monday September 16 at Gosforth Chess Club. Morpeth take on Forest Hall Badgers in the Cup Final, while Gosforth Regents play Gosforth Centurions in the Plate Final.
The Northumbria Masters Congress in Darlington concluded this Bank Holiday Monday with a striking success for Gosforth’s James Moreby, who won the International Master tournament. His IM result, called a norm, means he needs just one more such success to qualify for the title.
The Northumbria Masters Congress is in full swing this Bank Holiday weekend, with a total of nine Grandmasters and 11 International Masters playing nine games each at the Dolphin Centre, Darlington. The congress, with 150 players in total, is the North of England’s top annual international event.
North East players are welcome to enter the 7th Northumbria Masters Congress at Darlington’s Dolphin Centre, which takes place over the Bank Holiday weekend, from Thursday 22 to Monday 26 August. Entries are being accepted online until August 21 to give players the chance to play in the North of England’s premier international chess festival.
Seven Grandmasters and 10 International Masters are expected to play in the North East’s premier chess congress, the Northumbria Masters, which runs over the Bank Holiday weekend (22-26 August) at the Dolphin Leisure Centre in Darlington.
When you think of Tyneside football history, Wallsend Boys Club inevitably comes up. It was established more than a century ago, in 1904, initially to teach boxing to lads from Swan Hunters shipyards. The club switched its focus to football and became the stuff of legend. Among the 65 professional footballers who got their start at Wallsend are world-class players Alan Shearer and Peter Beardsley, to name just two. Today, the club has state-of-the-art sports facilities, and caters for girls and boys equally.
Great sporting talents, such as those at Euro 2024, do not appear overnight – they are many years in the making. Yet football clubs such as Newcastle tend to buy in the best talent from around the world, rather than undertake the hard work of developing homegrown talent, which takes far longer. If this is true with football, it’s doubly true with chess, where top players’ careers are measured in decades.