Author: Gawain
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Game of the Month April 2012
Apologies for missing out March’s GOTM but I’m been really busy! Updates on the Reykjavik Open and European Individual Championships will be written when I get time, but for now here’s the GOTM. After winning my first four rounds I started being paired up with the big boys. After draws with White against Nikita Vitiugov…
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Icelandic Club Championships – March 2012
Thursday evening we headed over to Heathrow for a flight to Keflavik, Iceland. The flight was a little delayed and, with very windy weather over Iceland, very bumpy but we arrived safely and were at the hotel by 2am Friday morning. Simon Williams was on the same flight but couldn’t make it onto the bus to…
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Bunratty Weekender
Last weekend Sue and I made the trip over to Shannon airport to play in one of the big two Irish weekend tournaments (the other is Kilkenny). Thanks to Gary O’Grady’s very generous sponsorship this year’s tournament was the strongest weekender I’ve ever seen and must have been the strongest ever tournament in Ireland. Nigel…
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Game of the Month – February 2012
While Sue’s been busy writing on our road trip I haven’t forgotten about my Game of the Month (actually I had but Sue emailed me to remind me!). I decided to choose one of my own games. Overall the tournament was a bit of a disaster from a rating point of view, losing to Chris…
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Back in New Zealand!
Hello again everybody. After a few days in Malaysia eating delicious noodles and pork buns, we arrived into New Zealand very early Wednesday morning. A day spent with Andrew, Sue’s brother in the Sylvia Park shopping mall and some Burger Fuel before Sue and I flew to Wellington for the start of our roadtrip down…
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Game of the Month January 2012
Welcome to this year’s first GOTM! This was a tricky one to choose as so many tournaments are being played currently. I was also not very up to date as had not been online for ten days or so over Christmas. However I found the following very interesting. Before we move on to the game…
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European Blitz and Rapid Championships
After a couple days off desperately writing my Chesspublishing update and annotating a couple of games for Chessbase I headed to Warsaw for the annual European Blitz and Rapid Championships. This year David Howell, Loz Cooper and Malcolm Armstrong also played which made it more of a social event than last year. The trip started…
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Game of the Month (just squeezing into December!)
Hi guys, As I wrote earlier I forgot to do the Game at the start of the month but here’s my game against Slavin as promised. I finished it a couple of days ago but was waiting for Sue to fix the pgn problem. I hope you enjoy and an update about the European Blitz…
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The London Classic – A delayed posting
UPDATE: Sue figured out the problem and now we have a pgn viewer back. I’d be in a lot of trouble without her! EDIT: At the moment I can’t get any of my pgn viewers to work so I’ll have to wait for my admin (Sue) to get back from work. Please bear with me!…
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Kilkenny Masters
(I wrote this offline and hadn’t seen Sue’s upload of Gerry’s repeat. Hence I repeat some of the same things but hopefully you’ll be interested in my perspective.) This weekend I had a quick trip across over to Ireland to play the Kilkenny Masters. The Kilkenny tournament has now been running for 35 years and…
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European Team Championships – Porto Carras
Hello all. Apologies for not updating during the tournament but I had very little time and the internet was sporadic at best. I started this before the last round, which I didn’t think I was going to play, but the situation changed and in the end I played all nine. I had the 4ncl straightaway…
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Game of the Month – November
Lots of interesting chess this month so it was a tough decision what to examine. I considered a game of Kramnik’s as he has had some good results recently and is 2800 on the list published yesterday. However in the end I decided to examine this game between two players who always produce exciting encounters.…
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Corsica – Round nine and knockout
Friday morning I had White against Bulgarian GM Ivan Cheparinov. I again used the repertoire in my How to Beat the Sicilian. We actually followed a line from the first game in the entire book! He deviated at move nine but I followed the same plan. I reached a position with more space and a…
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Corsica – Rounds Seven and Eight
I was too exhausted to update after my round seven game. Black against Tal Baron, another young IM who has a rating above 2500. I expected him to play 1.e4 but he surprised me with 1.d4 when I decided to repeat the Dutch. He played the 2.Nc3 sideline but didn’t play the most critical move…
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Corsica – Round Six
A double round day meant not so much time to prepare and as my opponent seemed to play lots of different things I took it pretty easy. He chose 1…e5 and 2…Nc6. I decided to go for a Scotch and we followed the critical game Shirov-Kramnik from Wijk aan Zee in January. I deviated on…
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Corsica Rounds Three, Four and Five.
Apologies for not updating yesterday. I was simply too shattered after a 74 move game in the second game and only got back to the room at about 10.30pm. But let’s go in order. Round three I had Black against a Bulgarian IM, Radoslav Dimitrov. He played the English and I chose a sort of…