Friday 8 June 2012

Victorian Open Day 1

Its a long weekend ... I've been spending the last few weeks doing quite a bit of chess coaching and arbiting a number of chess tournaments ... so as a 'break' from all these things, I decided to actually PLAY a chess tournament ... namely the Victorian Open, held at the Box Hill Chess Club.
The tournament is a 7 round event with time controls of 90 minutes + 30 seconds per move (the current standard time control for most FIDE rated events in Australia) & started with a round on Friday night, with later rounds at 10am (yes, horribly early for a chess tournament!) & 3pm on Saturday, Sunday & the public holiday Monday. There are around 80 players in the event (a few took byes in round 1, so I won't know the final field size until tomorrow), while I also don't really know where I am seeded at the moment. As happens with a tournament of this size, there is occasionally an administrative oversight (I know how easy it is to do from experience, having made a few in my relatively short time as an arbiter), and this meant that I was left out of the round 1 pairings. As it turned out, there were three other players who were in a similar situation, so that made for two pairings of 'leftover' players. This meant that I ended up playing Michael Placentino, who has an ACF rating of 1585 (I think if I was in my proper seeding position of around 10-15 I would have had an opponent around 1400 in rating). Luckily for me, Michael played very passively in the opening & found himself in trouble early & played a few errant moves, which almost gifted me the point. Having said that, I was a little disappointed not to have spotted the forced mate that the computer said I had with 17.Rh7+ (I had examined the move, but couldn't see the follow-up), missing the idea of Qh2, with unstoppable threats on the h-file.
Lets hope I can keep adding to the W column tomorrow!
I would expect the results to eventually be posted on ChessChat, although they have not been posted yet.

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