Selkirk lightning tournament: 30 Jun 2026

Mark is champion;  The Buzzer round gets its own trophy

Last night at Selkirk Chess Club we held our annual Buzzer Round, which is one of the dafter and more enjoyable nights in the club calendar.

For anyone who has never seen it before, the Selkirk Buzzer Round is, as far as I know, the brainchild of John Moore, the Selkirk Captain and a club stalwart. John brings in a homemade contraption that looks suspiciously like a homemade bomb, although thankfully all it does is beep at carefully annoying intervals.

As someone who is relatively new to lightning chess, here are my impressions:

The usual setting is roughly ten seconds of silence followed by a two-second beep. The rule is simple. You make your move on the beep. Not before it. Not after it. On the beep.

That sounds easy enough until you are actually sitting there, trying to calculate a position while knowing that a loud beep is about to bully you into making a decision. The result is frantic chess, a lot of laughing, some cursing, and a room full of people making moves they would absolutely never make in a normal game.

Because I have enjoyed playing in the Buzzer Round so much over the last couple of years, I decided it deserved a trophy. Not a shiny, mass-produced trophy from a catalogue, because that would have been completely wrong for the event. The Buzzer Round is handmade, silly, slightly chaotic, and very much part of the character of Selkirk Chess Club, so the trophy needed to feel the same.

With help from Hawick Men’s Shed, I put together a shield using a joke "panic button" online, some proper woodworking, a stand, and laser-cut plaques. The end result looks appropriately terrible, funny, and cute all at the same time, which is exactly what I was hoping for. It feels like it belongs with John’s original buzzer box, and that is much better than anything polished and shop-bought.

The evening itself was a great success. We had several boards set up, plenty of players, and everyone got through nine games. Because of the speed and nature of the event, no games were recorded, which is probably for the best. Some of the moves deserve to be forgotten immediately.

As the night went on, it became clear that Nick Dunne and Mark Gardiner were both very much in contention for the new trophy. Nick went through the evening unbeaten, scoring six wins and three draws. In most tournaments that would be enough to win it.

Not this time.

Mark managed eight wins from nine games, with just one loss, giving him a final score of eight points and making him the first winner of the new Buzzer Round trophy.

The final top standings were:

1. Mark Gardiner, 8 points
2. Nick Dunne, 7½ points
3. Sam Cornwell, 6½ points

It was also good to see that everybody got at least one win on the score sheet (Kevin beat John in the surprise upset of the evening!) which feels right for a night like this. The Buzzer Round is competitive, but it is mostly about the fun of being put under ridiculous pressure by a beeping box.

Congratulations to Mark, commiserations to Nick for going unbeaten and still not winning, and thanks again to John Moore for inventing one of the club’s strangest and best traditions.

The trophy now exists. It is daft, handmade, noisy, and slightly ugly.

Perfect.

8 of the 10 entrants

  Close-up of the buzzer

The new trophy, and this year's (and last year's) winner, Mark Gardiner