2015 Oceania Zonal - Day 1

The 2015 Oceania Zonal began with 103 players in the Open and 14 players in the Women's event. With such big numbers in the Open event (a new record), the gap between the top half and the bottom half was quite large. The top boards all went according to rating, and it wasn't until Board 20 before the first upset was recorded. This was Paul Russell's win over Jason Hu, while both Tom and Henry Slater Jones scored wins over higher rated opponents.
The Women's Zonal had a couple of semi-upsets where the Guo v Anton was quite a roller coaster, before the point was eventually split. Kashish Christian drew with Layla Timergazi, but the rest of the games went according to seeding.
The only real difficulty on the first day was with the live broadcasts (What? No!). Adding to the list of obscure things that can go wrong, a faulty extension cord failed to provide enough juice to the top boards, leading to intermittent coverage. However the problem has been fixed, so 6 boards should be in operation for the rest of the event.
Tomorrow is a double round day, with round 2 starting at 10:30am. The top two boards will be interesting from a Pacific point of view with Stuart Fancy (PNG) and Calvin Prasad (FIJ) up against the top two seeds (Illingworth and Ly).


Kelly, Adam - Illingworth, Max
2015 Oceania Zonal, 2015.07.04