Lockdown Blues? Join the Ginger GM Saturday Live Open 3 min Chess T...

Simon Williams, aka the GingerGM, is surely one of the most colourful characters in the contemporary chess world.

So when a notification popped up last Saturday that he'd be streaming a 1 hour chess tournament on his Twitch channel I popped over to have a look... Lotsa fun and a pretty good bunch of players at the top, including British champion David Howell...

Last night the 3rd tournament was played. I hesitated because (1) I've never been involved in an online tournament before and (2) I'm terribly bad at speed chess! But I couldn't resist it - free and easy to join, all levels of player welcome, so next thing I knew, I was stuck in, busy losing game after game!

Gradually, I got used to it and began to build advantageous positions - only to lose on time, time after time...

Then, to my surprise, I actually won a game - and recorded the moment for posterity!

I was playing on the Chess.com screen while listening to Simon commentating on his own games on Twitch.

I was fully expecting to end the hour on zero, right at the bottom of the pile, but that victory got me up to 134/177 players...

Then I managed to win another game with less than a second remaining... so I finished on 2/15 points and in 121st place, so I felt chuffed about that, compared to my expectations...

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Three-minute chess in a 60-minute online open tournament is a blast. It's free to join, and there's no commitment to stay the course. When you finish a game you can click a button when you are ready to dive in again.

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