Here is a list of common questions about the Club.
Our home venue is Cumberland Lawn Tennis Club, 25 Alvanley Gardens, London NW6 1JD (map), which is five minutes' walk from Finchley Road & Frognal Station. We meet in the Ramus Room, which is upstairs to the left of the main entrance.
We hold club nights there most Thursday evenings starting from 7:30pm, though we take a break over the summer and Christmas holiday periods.
We also organise teams to play in matches at other clubs. These take place across London on various weekday evenings.
A full schedule of all our events may be found in our calendar.
We have a few different types of club night:
We also run a few other types of events from time to time, such as simultaneous displays with a titled player, or a FIDE Rapid tournament.
It is best to check our event calendar to see what is taking place each week to plan your visit.
Another way to stay up-to-date is to register with us and opt in to receiving email about upcoming events.
See also our activities page.
Yes! We are happy for people to visit once or twice to meet us and sample a Club night before deciding whether to commit to membership.
Club nights where social chess is taking place are particularly suitable for this.
Please come along and introduce yourself! Also feel free to contact us in advance of your visit if you have questions.
We do ask that people become members if they wish to keep attending beyond these initial trial visits.
Absolutely, yes! We often have young players at our club nights, which we greatly appreciate.
Parents should be aware that all our events are for all ages, and we do not run events for unaccompanied children.
There is an excellent junior chess club in the area, Barnet Knights, which offers an environment tailored to young players, involving coaching and regular play. We find that many parents prefer to take their children there first, and bring them to Hendon a little later once they have built up some experience and feel ready to start playing in an all-ages environment.
However, we have no firm requirements in this regard: we are happy to welcome children whenever their parents feel the time is right for them to come to us.
For more information, please see our child safeguarding policy.
We are open to the possibility of running dedicated junior events in the future. The main prerequisite would be volunteers willing to run them (see below).
Unfortunately we are not able to offer much structured training or coaching at the Club. Hiring coaches would significantly increase our costs, which would require us to charge much higher membership fees.
If you are a parent looking for coaching for your child, please consider Barnet Knights, which is an excellent junior chess club in our area.
We have a number of members who offer coaching privately outside the Club; if you are interested in being put in touch, please contact us.
If anyone has ideas for offering our members more help to improve their chess without significantly increasing our costs, please get in touch!
We like to think so! Our events are regularly attended by people at or near beginner level:
While our activities provide plenty of the playing opportunities which are essential to chess improvement, we aren’t currently able to offer much structured training or coaching (see this question). Those interested in improving beyond the beginner level will probably need to supplement our activities with the many books, online courses or training apps which teach the fundamentals of the game in a rounded way.
We are always keen to welcome new players to our league teams!
Once you have registered with us, assuming you opted in to receive communications about our events, we will start sending you emails inviting you to matches we think may be suitable for you, based on your rating and other factors.
Some matches take place at our home venue, and others at the venues of other chess clubs (chess leagues typically follow a “double all-play-all” format, with each team in a division playing each other team twice, once at home and once away).
All Club members who indicate they are available for a match will be considered for selection according to the normal criteria of the team (for example playing strength or rotation).
If a player tells us they are available for one of our teams and is selected, then there are consequences for both us and the opposing team if the player does not fulfil their commitment to play in the match:
We therefore ask that players do not volunteer for matches unless they are willing to make a firm commitment to play if selected. We suggest that players not yet ready to make such a commitment should start by playing in individual events (though even for those, organisers appreciate advance notice of non-attendance).
Of course it sometimes happens that players have to withdraw from matches due to unforeseeable circumstances; we ask that in these cases, players notify the team captain as far in advance as possible to maximise their chances of finding a replacement (or at least allow them to notify the opposing captain so we can avoid imposing a wasted journey on one of their players).
For more information about the competitions we play in, please see our activities page.
A full schedule of matches may be found in our event calendar.
Tournaments in our event calendar normally have a link to an entry form in the event description. Just click the tournament in the calendar and you should find it.
Just come along to any club night marked in our calendar as being suitable for social chess!
You may find a filtered list of such events here.
Please see the question above for more information on our club nights and why some are more suitable for social chess than others.
Like most chess clubs, we are run by volunteers. By far the main constraint on our activities is the availability of people willing to donate their time and energy to make things happen.
There are plenty of things we would welcome help with, for example:
There are probably other things which would be beneficial to do which we haven’t thought of yet!
The Club welcomes people with an entrepreneurial spirit who are willing to bring fresh energy and ideas to the way we do things. If that describes you, please get in touch!
Finding a venue for a chess club which is affordable and meets all our requirements in regard to accessibility via various forms of transport, storage for our equipment, suitable furniture, size, environmental noise, availability of food and drink, security of tenure, et cetera, is a very difficult task. A brief conversation with anyone involved in running a chess club will confirm this!
The Club has gradually migrated south over a period of many years, as we have sought varying solutions to this problem. Our previous venue was in Golders Green; our current venue is at the extreme south of our traditional catchment area.
A new chess club setting up from scratch in our current location would probably not call itself “Hendon Chess Club”. However, renaming the club would require considerable effort which in our view would be better spent elsewhere, and would be a break with over 75 years of tradition with no especially compelling benefit.
It is entirely possible that the Club may decide to move north again in the future.
Unfortunately, disabled access is a problem at our current venue. Reaching our playing room requires climbing two flights of stairs. There are also two flights of stairs separating our playing room from the toilets. We currently have no wheelchair-accessible space available to us.
We greatly regret this. Finding a suitable venue for a chess club is extremely challenging; many of the venues for hire around London today lack disabled access, which is a problem for society as a whole. While we wish we did not have to trade off disabled access against other factors, that is the reality we face: our extremely limited resources prevent us from excluding venues with accessibility problems from consideration.
If any visiting team has a disabled player, the captain should please contact us well in advance of their matches at our venue so we can try to find alternative accommodation on a one-off basis.
Like many chess clubs, we are extremely diverse in some dimensions, for example age: there are few activities where you regularly see 8-year-olds participating alongside 80-year-olds! There are other dimensions where we are reasonably diverse, such as race, socio-economic status and religion.
However, there are a few ways in which the Club’s demographics differ very significantly from society in general. Foremost among these is gender: like many traditional chess clubs, the vast majority of our members are male. We are particularly low on adult female members.
We strive to be an inclusive chess club, and our aim is that everyone who loves chess (and is willing to live up to some basic standards of behaviour) should be made to feel as welcome as possible and treated with respect. Anyone who feels we have not lived up to this should please contact us to let us know what happened and how we can make things right.
However, inclusion requires more than warm intentions. Making the Club attractive to a wider range of people would probably require new types of event, new types of recruitment, and new types of leadership. As with many other aspects of how the Club runs, there is no shortage of possibilities here: the main limit is the availability of people willing to invest time and energy to bring them to fruition.
We are very much open to new ideas that would increase the diversity of the Club. If you have any to suggest – particularly if you can help us make them happen – please get in touch!