Author: Gawain
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British Championships – best game contenders!
As promised, here is a shortlist of interesting games from the Championships. This list isn’t anything like comprehensive, I didn’t see all the games and don’t mean to offend anyone who isn’t here and who felt they played a fantastic game; I probably just didn’t see it! This is just a personal snippet of the…
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British Chess Championship – Final words
Well it’s been a week and so I decided it was time for a write-up about the British Championships overall. Before I get into too much depth on that I should say a few words about my last round. I realised that there was a possibility that there was no difference in the tournament standings…
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British Championships – Round Ten
Success! Black against Aaron Summerscale was always going to be difficult. He’s a very solid player and has a fairly low rating simply due to drawing with too many lower rated players (and full time coaching in schools tires one out). Last time we played he defeated me in the British Rapidplay after I overpressed…
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Round Nine – British Championships
Today was a little disappointing. After following Howell-Adams for the first 14 moves I couldn’t remember any more theory and my plausible move turned out to be an error which left me suffering. Hawkins pounced on the error, sacrificing a pawn to destroy my pawn structure and gaining the bishop pair. I was forced to…
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Round Eight – British Championships
After my loss yesterday I was keen to bounce back in round eight. I was paired against David Howell, a young talent who has matured from being simply a chess prodigy to a well rounded strong player and number four in England. I had the White pieces and decided to try repeating what worked so…
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Round Seven – British Championships
After a great evening at Terry’s we got up reasonably early on the rest day and played some tennis with him and Matt. It was good fun but I think we were all a bit slow after the previous evening! After that Sue and I walked over to the Botanical Gardens which were rather further…
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British Chess Championships – Round Four
Hey everyone. I’m writing a quick update personally while I try to get Sue interested in Les Miserables 🙂 My game against Susan Lalic went well today. The opening was an Advanced Caro-Kann and quickly an interesting imbalance emerged with me having the bishop pair but doubled c pawns against her central pawns. It was…
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Commonwealth Championships Roundup
Hello again dear readers. Again apologies for the delay in uploading. The internet in South Africa was a bit temperamental, in the end I got online with a 3G usb modem but had to be a bit careful with my limit. Anyways, as you have seen the tournament was a success and I managed to…
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South Africa Safari Part Two
After lunch we drove over to another lodge owned by a chess enthusiast. It was a wonderful place with 5 big double bedrooms, a pool table and even its own bar! The view was stunning, straight across the river into the park and we saw hippos wallowing in the glorious mud (see Flanders and Swann).…
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Safari time – Pre tournament preparation!
The journey to Heathrow during the day is definitely a lot easier than coming back from Stansted at night, and I was at the terminal within an hour of leaving the house. As I arrived to check in for my 18:50 flight to Madrid I was told that it was running late and so was…
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Return to Lucca (Part 1&2)
On Thursday morning I left rainy England from London Stansted and a couple hours later arrived in a roasting Pisa. An old friend of mine, Luca Bernardini, met me at the airport and kindly drove me what should be only 30km or so to Lucca. Unfortunately, whilst trying to avoid the centre of Pisa he…
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A Classical Trip
Hello again everybody. On June 1st I headed off to Greece to do some work and only got back yesterday evening. It was hard work but enjoyable and hopefully it’ll come in handy. I only got out a couple of times but I managed to see a few sights. Shortly after arriving we went…
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Chesspublishing
I’m sad to announce that the June update will be my last 1.e4… until at least February 2012. I hope all subscribers have enjoyed my column as I throughly enjoyed annotating the games. The reason behind my depatures is my need to focus on my own chess (novelties, playing e.t.c) and unfortunately Chesspub is just too time…
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Gelfand victorious in Kazan!
In my last write up I left the Candidates Matches with two Classical games to go and my forecast was rather bleak for entertainment value. Out of the 28 games played at a normal time control there had been 26 draws and just 2 wins (both with Black!). Recently Silvio Danailov, the current ECU President…
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Round 5 Ennis GAME
Here is the annotated Game between Gawain and GM Vlad Jianu – Hopefully we will be able to upload the video of their endgame in the next week! Press the speech bubble to see the annotation. I noticed that Vlad was exclusively a Dragon player (and always played this rather odd …Qc7) so I decided…
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Candidate Matches – Final!
A lot has happened since I wrote about the Candidates matches. I was right that Aronian and Kramnik were the favourites but that doesn’t mean they were guaranteed to progress. Kramnik duly survived scraping through the blitz although Radjabov can count himself unlucky as after going one up in the rapids it looked he was…