Two’s a crowd

The British Championship, which finished in Aberystwyth last week, has been shared by international master Jonathan Hawkins and the defending champion David Howell. Curiously, this is the first occasion on which a tie at the top has resulted in a shared title, rather than some sort of tie-break or play-off, as occurred with Hartston and Basman in 1973 (won by Hartston) and Adams and Short in 2011, where Adams won the decider. In 1954 Leonard Barden and Alan Phillips tied for first prize and also tied in the play-off. In 1997 a four-way play-off took place which resulted in Matthew Sadler and Michael Adams being joint winners.
 
Without wishing to denigrate the achievements of the two fine players who won jointly at Aberystwyth, I do feel that the public deserves to have one champion. If there was not time for a play-off, would it not have been better to break the tie on which of the two faced the stronger opposition? In this case, Hawkins’s tournament rating performance was 2621 against 2615 for Howell, and this would have been sufficient to decide the championship in favour of Hawkins.