GM Gawain Jones is the 2011 Commonwealth Champion. He finished tied for first with GM Nigel Short, but edged him out on tie-break. Both players scored 9.5/11 in the South African Open/Commonwealth Championship event that finished yesterday in South Africa. Australian GM David Smerdon finished in a tie for third (and third on tie-break) despite his claims of playing terrible chess throughout the tournament.
While Jones was justifiably happy with his title, Short expressed his displeasure with the tie-break system used, stating it was not much better than a "coin-flip". Assuming that the tie-breaks listed at chess-results.com were the ones used by the organiser, then the first tie-break was a fairly standard Buchholz, albeit with the top 2 and bottom 2 scores dropped. I suspect the cause of Short's annoyance is that you can never really know which of your opponents will be included in your final tie-break score, as final round results not only change your tie-break total, but may also change your tie-break field.
Event results (plus a selection of games up until round 8) can be found here.
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Congratulations also must go to Thomas Feng also from Aus, who won the u16 gold medal in the event. *clap clap*
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