SCCA 25^th Anniversary Match v. ICCF Select

This event was devised as part of our celebrations of the 25^th anniversary
of our founding in 2002. Basically the idea was to play a match with as
many boards as possible (by either email or post) against an ICCF select
team. Organising the event soon proved to be a considerable task and
I am grateful to Richard Beecham who recruited the Scots players.
As we hoped for at least 125 boards, it was clear that the Scots players would
have to play more than 1 board and “volunteers” were asked to specify the
number of boards they could take – Jim Anderson and Derek Coope both
agreed to take 6! As each board involved 2 games (1 White, the other Black),
Jim and Derek both took on 12 games! Obviously it was desirable to try to
pair everyone against opponents of roughly equal strength and so it was
necessary to carefully outline “rating requirements” when extending
invitations to other Federations – also, care had to be taken in offering
postal boards only to those countries with good postal connections!
Due to the aforementioned “rating requirements”, the ICCF team
(average rating 2020), drawn from 19 countries, was in no way representative
of ICCF’s true strength but rather tailored towards our strength (average rating 1984).

Eventually, pairings were produced for players from 20 countries over
129 boards (47 postal & 82 email) and play finally commenced on 1 December 2002.
I captained the Scots team whilst Duncan Chambers (ENG) kindly agreed to fulfil
this role on behalf of the ICCF team. Unfortunately, for various reasons, play
had to be abandoned during the first year on 5 boards. However, everything
seemed to go smoothly on the remaining 124 boards and presently, almost
3 years after the start, only 3 games remain unfinished. As in all such friendly
matches, the overall score is relatively unimportant. For the record, the ICCF select,
currently ahead by 147 points to 98, won comfortably.

We also provide a selection of annotated games from the event.