Apologies (once again!) for the long break between postings, I will endeavour to ensure at least one blog post a month from now on. My first tournament of the year was Gibraltar (I had won a couple of 4NCL games beforehand). The event was even more formidable with the usual very strong selection of female players. Brian Callaghan pulled another rabbit out of his hat last year by making Stuart Conquest tournament director, a move that worked very well. Simon Williams proved an excellent replacement in the commentary room.
Unfortunately first Tara, and later I, went down with the ’flu which took a bit of the fun out of proceedings. My best bit of preparation ever remains when I had a ‘flu shot before Wijk aan Zee and later learned Kasparov had taken the same precaution! It goes without saying – I was not as switched on this year! I don’t think it made too much difference to my final score: my reasonable start foundered against solid play by my later opponents. Congratulations to Nigel Short and Vasily Ivanchuk who were in a class of their own.
Archive for category Tournaments
Ivanchuk rocks the Rock
Apr 27
Simpson’s Simul Swindle
Dec 26
One of the nice touches at the London Classic is the simultaneous display that accompanies the closing dinner: all the participants give a tandem simul making one move each in turn which leads to a happy kind of chaos. The event is quite competitive as several of the boards (each having 4 players consulting) have on their team a GM including Speelman, King, Rowson, Norwood, Watson, Keene and several other handy players; last year the tournament participants had a fairly heavy loss. Chess players are maniacally quite competitive and this year we were paying a bit more attention (whilst making sure not to miss out on their Yorkshire pud and glasses of claret). Malcolm Pein gave a running commentary on the mic, eventually he announced that the score was even at 8 all with just 1 game remaining, at this stage Magnus took over the game , a not unwelcome development that I wouldn’t have minded availing myself of on a few other occasions. Still the game seemed destined for a draw as there were only queens and a few pawns remaining, the Black players were the presidents of three federations :CJ de Mooi of the ECF ,Tomas Sielicki of the Polish Federation, Viktor Kapustin of the Ukraine Federation and Frederic Friedel of Chessbase fame who had put up stiff resistance in a Stonewall Dutch.
Magnus has just nudged his king forward to h4, a move which contained a rather vicious trap.
I hope all my visitors have had a happy holiday season – all the best for 2011!
London Chess Classic
Dec 14
We’re now past the rest day in the London Classic and coming into the home stretch. Pretty open field so a lot to play for!
Olympiad Blues
Oct 30
Moving onto the chess, I think that if you had told me beforehand that I would beat Magnus Carlsen and we would place ahead of two Russian teams I would have thought the event had gone fairly well! However, it didn’t really work out like that; I got the team off to a bad start losing the decisive game to Bosnia in round 2, we gradually climbed the boards but made a hash of our best opportunity to get near the leaders with an apparently promising pairing with Belarus in round 8 going very sour. We went on to beat a weakened German team before drawing with the Netherlands and Czech Republic. This left us 20th equal. A kinder pairing towards the end would have put a more positive spin on things but it was a disappointment not to visit the top boards at any stage. Ultimately though, the main problem was that only Gawain was in really good form and you need more players firing to compete with the very strong opposition these days.
Considering my first two games I was fairly happy with my result although six whites in the last nine games helped. Physically I wasn’t in great shape, really struggling with the 5 hour time difference for the first few rounds, to be fair I imagine most of my opponents had similar difficulties. I then got sick shortly before round 6 but managed to struggle through the remaining games. I think this was the first time I played all the rounds in an Olympiad (my previous best being 13 out of 14 in Yerevan). Still a win against Magnus definitely made things worthwhile.
For a long time the pairing system in the Olympiad has worked quite well with scoring by board points, bucking the maxim of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, the powers that be have now switched to match points with a new pairing system with predictably bad results. There are few things so bad they can’t be made worst and the pairings this time were completely hopeless, I hope they can return to the simpler methods of the past.
This Year: Canterbury
Sep 11
Canterbury seemed, to a rare participant, to be an above average venue for the British championships: a nice town with a decent playing hall and reasonable accommodation available at the university. The main drawbacks seemed to be the failure of the university to open any restaurants during the weekend, a move which cost them a lot of money as well as causing considerable inconvenience due to the lack of other options nearby. Failing to keep the bar open on the last night as they had done on other occasions was probably also not financially astute. During my longest stay on a campus my main problem was the extreme temperature in my room, until I managed to circumvent health and safety by acquiring the requisite Allen key to open the window more than a crack my room closely resembled a sauna.
Some of my games have already been annotated for the Telegraph, and others will appear in BCM and Chessbase but I will mention an interesting moment in my game with Richard Pert in the third round. Read the rest of this entry »
Number Crunching
Jun 20
Lets return as promised to Open Tournament number 2, the European Individual Championship in Rijeka. Here things defaulted back to my traditional open routine, as despite starting with 3.5/4 I was out of the money even before the last round began. This was a ridiculously strong event in relation to the prize fund, perhaps as several federation’s cover all the player’s expenses. The ECF doesn’t prioritize the event in the same way, so it isn’t a greatly appealing event for English players and this was the first time I had played. The event is one way to qualify for the World Cup but perhaps given the continually ‘evolving’ status of that event most players didn’t seem too interested in this preferring to throw the dice hoping for a big payday instead. In general the organisers did a decent job, but the bus transfers between the hotels and playing hall left a lot to be desired especially given the transfer fees they had received from the participants. The unseasonably cold weather with snow on some days didn’t add much to this aspect of the tournament either.
I did achieve one curiosity, my second round game reminded me of a game from the dim and distant past. John Emms achieved an impressively spectacular drop in computer evaluation (despite retaining a winning position) in his game with Fressinet back in the Istanbul Olympiad when he erred on his 30th move.
I was intrigued by this and was always on the lookout for similar “achievements”, but was unaware my second round game had thrown up a similar curiosity until I saw Mig mention it in his Blog.
In the game after some cooperative play from my opponent, I had managed to remedy a fairly dodgy opening and put the boot in on the kingside, strangely again it is the 30th move that sends the numbers tumbling like BP’s share price. Read the rest of this entry »
Chess in the US of A
Jun 7
I’ll post something about the European individual in Rijeka in a bit but will try and get a little more current with the Chicago Open. This was my first open event in the US since the New York Open in 1996. Not much had changed, as just as in that event Loek van Wely won the tournament with 7.5/9 and I ended up in a tie for second with 7.
In the US you supply your own playing apparatus, which seems to confuse a lot of people, despite it being fairly unsubtly covered on the entry form with the phrase ‘bring your own set and board’. Another oddity is the ‘time delay’ time control, instead of adding time per move, the clock is ‘frozen’, in this case by 5 seconds per move, and only after this pause does your time begin to tick down again. It seems to be a sop to those who cannot manage their time properly when increments are not possible due to the tight playing schedule. At least that is the theory I think. In practise I did not get to experience this at all as my opponents were either equipmentally challenged or tardy (being punctual seems to almost guarantee using your own gear – see photo) or both and my aged DGT did not support this ground breaking innovation. Read the rest of this entry »
A Good Start to the Year
Jun 7
My blog seems to have been suffering from lethargy writer’s block but it is now up and running. I am recapping a few events going back to the start of the year, when by happy coincidence I managed to win a tournament. For a long time open tournaments were a rare feature in my schedule, but this year I have already taken part in three and have at least one more to go. In my infrequent appearances I seem to recall a history of good starts tailing away to insipid finishes often leaving me just short of the major prizes.Missed opportunities in rounds 6 and 7 of Gibraltar seemed part of a worryingly familiar dismal pattern, so it was a very pleasant surprise to stagger over the finish line in front. Gibraltar is by the way an excellent event with friendly organisation and very decent weather for the time of year and of course a chance to get up close and personal with the Barbary Macaques. I look forward to defending my title (sadly not something I can say often) next year.
Chicago Open
May 1
Michael Adams will be playing in the Chicago Open at the Westin Chicago North Shore Hotel between May 27th – 31st.
Tournament homepage: Chicago Open 2010