This year for the first time the congress was thrown open to all comers and held at the Falmouth Hotel. This proved to be a splendid venue in every way. With a magnificent view across Falmouth Bay and comfortable and quiet playing-rooms, everything conspired to produce ideal conditions for playing chess.

The lion's share of the credit for the success of the event is due to three people. Organisers Colin and Rebecca Gardiner identified the Falmouth Hotel as a promising venue, successfully negotiated the booking for the first weekend in May, designed and distributed the brochure and thoroughly publicised the event at the many congresses they attended beforehand. They were efficient and unobtrusive organisers throughout. ECF arbiter, John Constable from Bude was the controller and his vast experience and knowledge ensured that the chess aspect of the event ran smoothly at all times. A new and very useful feature was the instantaneous live posting and update of the results and standings to utuswiss.co.uk

The total entry was 77 with 33 from Cornwall and 44 from across the Tamar, including players from Kendal, Carlisle, Harrogate, Norwich and the Isle of Man. The overwhelming positive feedback that we have received is most heartening and we look forward to welcoming back as many as possible, together with some new people, next year.

Brendan O'Gorman, who is well known for taking his camera to the many congresses he attends and posting albums of photos to his website, has produced a fine set of pictures of our congress. These can be found at https://brendanogorman.smugmug.com/Chess/Falmouth. Brendan has kindly given his permission for photos from his site to reproduced here and I intend to do this in due course.

The complete round by round pairings and final crosstables for all three sections can be found at utuswiss.co.uk. I have also posted a printable copy here.