Club captain's News & Weekly Bulletins

Round 6 of the Box Hill OPEN for 2005.

When the money-end of the tournament is in sight the favourites seem to take more care to win. This reduces the number of upsets, although the games remain very competitive.

On board 6 Devrim van Dijk had his best result for quite a while with a draw against John Nemeth who seemed to have the better of the position until one loose move squandered the win. Another to jump-start his form out of the doldrums was Artem Nikolayevsky who upset Chris Brook’s ambitions of a rating prize. Marcus Raine overcame the handicap of a spilt bag of books to regain his composure to keep David Flude out of the winners circle. Garry Lycett found Rengan Vijayakumar a handful after the ERGAS training camp, and had to settle for a draw. Shaun Fielder was a pawn up against Ramo Burzic but could not find the winning plan; after game analysis with Gary Wastell highlighted the need to aim for gradual improvement of the position of pieces; Ramo took the full point on the night.

Simon Takouridis continued his good form with a commendable draw against Jason Tang. A similar good result for Vanja Rozenblat against Derek Yu. But sister Sally Yu had the big upset win of the night against Stephen Doon, despite a large ratings difference. Sally recently won a division of the events conducted with the Victorian Championships.

On board 29, Nicholas Liu and Vladimir Zacharcenko got into a seemingly endless loop as they were unaware of the protocol and conditions for claiming a draw under the three-fold repetition rule. Eventually ennui took over and they ‘just agreed a draw’. If you are unaware of exactly how to claim a ‘draw by repetition’ choose a moment to ask one of the Arbiters in the Club. Finally, it is a milestone to note Alan Gray’s fine win over Flinder Hiew; Alan has steadily improved from the novice category since he joined the Club.

The Chess Club Committee has run out of avenues to negotiate Friday rental of the venue in 2006, and we will have to look elsewhere for the Friday programme. Under serious consideration at the moment is the Masonic Hall in Canterbury.
 

Round 5 of the Box Hill OPEN for 2005.

Round 5 is the business end of the tournament when players having a good run of wins start to eye various rating prizes. While Domagoj Dragicevic is a clear half-point ahead at the moment, he meets the #1 seed in round 6 in a game that could well decide first
prize. In Division B, Takouridis, Podvorac, Gan, and Dalton L. all could have designs on cash honours, but as we know much depends on the tougher opponents they face now that they have floated up to Division A opponents.

The results on the first 8 boards raised no eye-brows, but on board 9 Eugene Schon once again showed that his rating will increase  further; this time Hong Lin was an unwary victim. The game between Reubban Muthusamy and Devrim van Dijk lurched from blunder to blunder until the higher rated Reubban finally lost his focus. I watched the after game analysis between Ramo Burzic and Norm Wilson with great interest; a well-played game with a few spots  where better moves were found after more reflection.

Anton Nincevic had a good win over Derek Yu to recapture some rating points. And Laurie Dalton showed that coaching could benefit via osmosis. These two winners meet in round 6. The big upset of the round was Zhong Hao Gan's success over Rob McCulloch. Board 37 also saw a major upset where Shananthan Balachandran defeated Eric Neymanis. And next door Ke-Li Chow had a good win from Matthew Partridge.

The club also held its monthly ROOKIES and QUEENS Cup over the week-end; four tied for first place. These are the next upstarts that will cause upsets. I leave the reader to track down the details on the notice-board to see who to keep an eye on.
 

Round 4 of the Box Hill OPEN for 2005.

Round 4 results had no surprises on the top 8 boards. But there was a bit of a wreck on board 9 where highly-rated Thai Ly rushed from work and arrived late for the game; he had a chance to catch his breath, after a quick loss, that would have been better spent before the first moves. One board away, on 10, Rengan Vijayakumar must have caused ERGAS squad flashback for Marcus Raine as he took a point from a player nearly 600 rating points higher. And one board away from that Eugene Schon spotted Tom Narenthran 250 points but came a way with a win. That little corner of the playing hall must have been the Bermuda triangle of the night.

On board 16 Trevor Chong was winning all the way until he didn’t; how often have we heard that from a player. B Division player Anton Nincevic floated up to an A Division opponent and suffered his first loss.

To my mind the biggest upset of the week was Simon Takouridis (951) win over Derek Yu (1520). Simon has some fantastic scalps lately, but this is his best to date.

George Umber dropped a point to James Cameron and will be hoping for less dangerous pairing next week. Steven Doon has been causing his share of upsets in other tournaments recently, but newcomer Dmitry A Kulshitsky put in his best performance to date to take a full point from Steven.

We welcomed and exchange student from China; Wen Dan He, and watched with interest as she drew with Susan Sheng. Paul Sanderson was paired against Marieke van Dijk for about the third tourney in a row; Marieke won yet again. Ke-Li Chow showed the benefits of ERGAS squad training to have a nice win over Broderic Indranada.
 

Round 3 of the Box Hill OPEN for 2005.

Fourteen of the 94 players scheduled to play in round 3 arrived looking a trifle tired and worn; they had been participants in a week-long training camp called the ERGAS training squad. The squad is Australia’s elite 30 juniors and they have had their camp in Melbourne for the first time. The venue for their coaching and training tournament has been the Box Hill Town Hall, and they are sponsored by Professor Ergas from Canberra.

The evening got off to a rocky start as it transpires that the Venue manager had hired the back room of our Club rooms to a community group that had 40 folk attending a formal lecture. It is hoped that this was a one-off occurrence.

Our usual Arbiter, Gerrit Hartland is overseas for 4 weeks and the new contact arrangements are to ring Trevor Stanning on the Club mobile (0409 259 490) as early in the week as possible to arrange postponements or to adjust the pairings.

The game of board 1 was well fought and Rukman Vijayakumar (from the Ergas squad) showed good form to hold IM Peter Froehlich to a draw. On board 7 Chris brooks showed benefit of his recent private coaching to defeat a fatigued David Flude (David had been assisting the ERGAS squad all week). Nearby on 9, Peter Braham got a creditable draw from highly rated Thai Ly, and on 10 Rolf Exner took the honours from newcomer Andrei Krawcheni. On 11, Howard Liston struggled in a R+P end-game to draw with Ramo Burzic.

Peter Schulzer is a previous winner of the OPEN, but juniors get under his guard on occasions, and this time Jason Tang took full points. Simon Takouridis has struck a rich vein of good form and beat Stephen Doon despite a large ratings difference. On the bottom board Bishoy Alphons had the first win in a major event that I can remember; well done Bishoy.

I was pleased to see more after game analysis occurring this week. This is the road to improvement for plenty of good players in the past and it is good to be able to see another player’s view of the positions throughout the game. I think this is a superior use of time at the Club than adrenalin-inducing Transfer past-time.