So I realize this blog is going up relatively soon after the last one, for some reason I decided not to click the “Publish” button on my rather large safari review. I have now returned home from South Africa, and have successfully negotiated my first day back at work (IMHO the day immediately after a holiday is always the worst).
The Commonwealth Championships were a truly wonderful tournament – I have heard some rather disparaging remarks on some forums and blogs about the tournament, particularly to do with the coverage on the internet of the top games. This happens at plenty of tournaments, so any criticism leveled at the organizing committee, or any of the people who devoted their time to this tournament is completely unwarranted and ridiculous. For me, this tournament was the best run tournament I have attended (with the possible exception of Queenstown, both tournaments are fantastic events) – nearly 700 players would be a nightmare for any group of organizers, particularly when the target for entries was somewhere around half that, so for the tournament to go off with as few hiccups as it did is a real credit to the professionalism, dedication and tireless work of all the people behind the scenes – I tried to get to all of you after the tournament, but I know I missed some of you, so please take this as my thanks. If it wasn’t for you, there wouldn’t be nearly 600 players leaving such a tournament with such good feelings (I need to subtract the usual 15% who just are disappointed and disillusioned about chess after a tournament).
So onto my tournament review: both a review of my tournament, and some more general thoughts on the results and the social side. For those of you familiar with the concept of tournaments A, B and C I will try and cover as much of the latter two without giving too much away.
Day one: The first round managed something that resembled an on time start. Given that it seems to be traditional at chess tournaments for the first round to be somewhere between half an hour (in this case) or 3 hours (as was the case in a tournament I played here in South America) late starting I need to give this tournament a massive “tick” (in-joke). The opening ceremony was well run, with some notable speakers – some well written speeches (they sounded like they had been prepared by an eloquent friend of mine, but perhaps that’s just coincidence) and the seemingly obligatory microphone to the mouth got everything going nicely. It was rumored that Kirsan, FIDE’s fearless leader was to be attending, but alas was a no-show… perhaps the aliens came back? Or perhaps he was still slogging out an endgame against Gaddafi?
I fortunately had a reasonably comfortable win against my first round opponent, although he played rather well, until one unfortunate slip up meant that when he blundered the pawn his whole position collapsed around him. Pretty much all games (as is generally expected in a Swiss) went according to seed, and Gawain, Dave and I managed to catch up for some beers prior to the Blitz championships. Dave and Gawain didn’t appear to suffer any ill-affects from these, however I ran into significant hurdles from round 4-7 losing 3 games in a row (2 of them on time completely won, and blundering a queen in a won position due to somehow ending up with 30s on my clock in a closed middlegame) and then managing to checkmate with 4 seconds remaining. I thought that perhaps the positions on the board were a good omen for the main event and my speed was simply a result of not playing the same amount of Blitz as I used to. I can´t let this tournament go without touching on the type of chess that was played – for me, Blitz tournaments are always a good aside to the main event, and are generally a casual affair. This certainly wasn’t the case on the Saturday night – I have never seen the amount of “dirty” chess as was present during this tournament. Knocking the queen off the table when someone is about to promote, pushing pawns two squares, claiming wins for an illegal move for promoting and not replacing the piece (to me it’s just bad sportsmanship, regardless of whether it is technically correct) and offering draws every few moves with clearly no other objective than distracting the opponent. Nonetheless, clearly the best blitz player in the field GM Gawain Jones took home the bickies with an awe-inspiring 9/9 performance.
On the second day of the tournament it turned out I was wrong about my blitz results being due to not playing much fast chess, instead I was just out of form. Round 2 the following morning saw me win a game rather easily where my opponent blundered a piece and then proceeded to force me to checkmate him (a rather frustrating experience, given that when he had blundered the piece he had used 10 minutes, and then proceeded to use a further 1:10 excluding increment to get to the final position). I then had a nap and some lunch in News Café (a regular haunt of us chess playing folk for our preparation) and saw that I was playing a 12yo FM – A really nice kid, Daniel played extremely well and despite me winning a pawn basically straight out of my preparation, he played extremely accurately and punished my various inaccuracies to hold onto an extremely impressive draw. My only gripe with Daniel is his ELO of 1600 being so far below his strength that the draw cost me more points than a win over a 2100!! At this point, there had been quite the stir in the hall as a few of the top seeds faltered, with an extremely impressive performance from the young WFM Ivana Furtado from India drawing with countryman GM Abhijit Kunte whilst Tanishe Tafira held GM Laxman to a draw as well. There was significant controversy with one GM having to play an extremely distracting opponent who had been on a bender the night before and was fumbling, making distracting noises and generally being a jerk at the board. It turns out that this opponent was stoned and was barely in physical shape to walk, yet somehow managed to play some rather good chess.
Round 4 was when everything seemed to happen. As we were preparing for our games all the top seeds in wimbledon seemed to be falling like flies, riots began breaking out in Syria and Greece and the only thing in worse shape than the Greetian economy was my position after 20 moves – I played a really disappointing game against my opponent who just didn’t seem to make a mistake, and whilst I played passively I didn’t feel like I made a huge blunder… Damn juniors!! All the undefeated top seeds managed to continue their winning form going, with one exception - one of my new mates Anant Dole had an extremely impressive draw with black(!) against German Champion IM Huschenbach.
That concludes the review of the first half of the tournament - I will finish it up tomorrow (provided my internet and electricity are working - running off battery and a really dodgy free wireless connection atm that isn't as reliable as I would like!9
