Newport’s Rapid success
Newport A swelled their already bulging trophy cabinet by being the class of the field in the Shropshire chess summer team rapidplay tournament.
With International Master Lawrence Cooper on top board and Nick Rutter, whose rapidplay grading almost matches Cooper’s, on board two, the opposition were always going to find them tough to beat.
Newport topped the league stages in the competition, held at The Wrekin Housing Trust offices in Telford, and then thumped Maddocks 4-1 to progress to the final.
Trying to halt the Newport juggernaut were the other finalists, a composite team called the Mad Wolves, comprising players from the Oakengates based Maddocks club and players from the Wolverhampton League, but there were swept aisde 5-0.
Newport 5, Mad Wolves 0: L Cooper 1, N Walker 0; N Rutter 1, E Angelov 0; N Paul 1, P Bull 0; C Lewis 1, S Tarr 0; I Jamieson 1, T Preece 0.
Maddocks beat Telepost A in the play-off for third place.
Players had 20 minutes to complete all their moves in each round and as the clocks ran down there were some comic incidents, with some blatant illegal moves being missed in the melee.
Telepost’s Kate Walker, playing white, queened a pawn and immediately picked up a black queen and started playing with it until, amid laughter, a white queen was substituted.
