2009 O2C Doeberl Cup - Day 1

(Apologies for missing the midnight deadline to post this).

This years Doeberl Cup got of to a punctual and relaxed start. After the usual flurry of last minute drops outs and entries, the Premier ended up with a field of 76 players, slightly down on last year. The highlight of this years event is the big Indian contingent, with 15 players taking part. In terms of titled player the Premier has 7 GM's, 13 IM's, 3 WGM's, 2 WIM's, 6 FM's and 1 WFM.
The major talking point of the first day was the carnage inflicted upon the higher seeded players on the top boards. In the first round the GM 'team' managed to only score '+2', with 3 GM's being held to draws and GM Shojaat Ghane losing to Canberra junior Andrew Brown. The mistreatment at the hands of the lower ranked players continued in round 2 with the result that no GM is on a perfect score (although top seed Dimitri Reinderman contributed to this bye taking a half point bye).
FM Tomek Rej scored the big upset with a won over Gawain Jones on the top board, while Abhijit Kunte was held to a draw by FM Geoffrey Saw on board 2. Third seed GM Neelotpal Das is even stuck on 50% after a second round draw with WIM Arianne Caoili.
As for the running of the tournament most things went smoothly. The registration process seemed much easier this year and the first round started on time. The live broadcast system was set up and working before the start of the round, although live coverage was brought undone by a server crash on the far side of the world, meaning the tournament web site was off th air for 3 hours. And the result of the Zibaei v Xie was mis-recorded (it was a win for Xie but recorded as the opposite), resulting in a set of pairings had 4 players playing 'outside' their score groups.
As noted in my previous post, you can get the results and pairings from this link at www.chess-results.com