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Editor: Dr Tim Harding |
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Editor: Dr Tim Harding |
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© Dr Tim Harding
Last modified:
13 April 2025
For more information about chess for over-50s, please see our Seniors calendar and main Seniors news page. Newcomers to 50+ chess should read our Seniors introduction page. We also have pages for specific British Seniors and Irish Seniors news.
The European Senior Team Championships concluded today with round nine in Swidnica, Poland, where 17 teams competed in the two sections, both opf which were won by the English first teams.
The last round started an hour earlier: 2pm local time today, with all games broadcast live on Lichess and maybe on other platforms. Individual and team results and other information about how the tournaments progressed can still be found on the chess-results pages. Also see our British seniors page for more details about the English and Welsh performances.
The round-robin phase of the 50+ tournament had ended on Friday after which double head-to-head matches decided the final placings. England-1 beat Germany 3-1 yesterday to consolidate their leading position.
So today Germany needed to beat the English by at least 3.5-0.5 in the last round and this never seemed likely. After about two hours play boards 2-4 had all ended in draws with only the Bischoff-Adams game continuing but that also was eventually drawn. Germany therefore took the silver medals.
England-2 won the bronze medals. Yesterday they had beaten fourth-placed Wales Silures 2.5-1.5 and in today's return match boards 3 and 4 were both soon drawn, leaving the Welsh requiring wins in both the remaining games to reverse the relative positions, which they were unable to do. The match again ended 2.5-1.5 so Wales finished fourth.
In today's other final round matches Swidnica and Caissa Poland drew 2-2 in the contest for fifth and sixth places, so Swidnica were fifth. England Women finished seventh after beating Giecek Radków 2.5-1.5.
In the 65+ tournament, there had never been much sporting tension. The top two positions were already decided after round 8, with England-1 first while Lower Silesia (who had the last round bye) finished second on 12MP.
The bronze medals were up for grabs today with three teams having a chance.
In the final round, the German club, Zähringen Reloaded quite quickly won 4-0 against the Croatian club Mursko Sredice to finish on 9 match points. Mursko Sredice will probably want to forget this tournament in which their result was 31 games played (and one defaulted), no wins, one game drawn and 30 losses.
The other two matches crucial for the bronze medal battle were England-2 v Saxony and Osnabrück v Belgium. Saxony avoided tiebreaks by winning their won their match 3-1 against England-2 and so finished on 11MP.
Belgium beat Osnabrück 3-1 so finished fourth with 10 MP.
England-1 beat Finland 3-1 in a match irrelevant to the medals as England already had 14MP and Finland were on 3.
The small fields were probably due to the proximity of dates to the recent World Senior Team Championships which you can read about elsewhere on this site. This was a very disappointing state of affairs, but we expect that numbers will be much higher in 2026 when there will be a bigger time interval between the two team tournaments and the Greek island venue of Rhodes is likely to be more attractive.
It appears that the teams which withdrew from the 50+ were Polish but the 65+ section lost one of the contenders for gold. The Lasker Schachstiftung team from Germany, which took silver in the world event and was to have included four grandmasters, no longer appears on the list.
More details about the event may be found on the organisers' home page.
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You can also still find our reports on the 2024 European Senior individual championships, and the 2024 European Senior Team championships. We still await details from the ECU about this year's European individual senior championships.
Back to our main Seniors news page