Asian Juniors and Girls Online Championship - Oceania Qualifier

The Oceania Qualifier for the Asian Junior and Girls Online Championship was held today. Hughston Parle (the only Australian representative) was the winner of the Open section, scoring 6/6. The key game was his win over FM Daniel Gong (NZ), although he had a lucky escape in the final round when Michael Sole (NZ) missed a sequence in the middlegame that would have won him material. Gong and FM Allan Fan (NZ) took the next 2 places, and also qualified for Thursday's final.
In the Girls event it was a New Zealand clean sweep, with Isabelle Ning, Rikita Joseph and Emily Gan taking the top 3 places.

I was the Chief Arbiter for the event, but as the field was quite small, I did not have a too much to do. The major task was making sure everyone had their zoom connections running, their cameras at the correct angle (showing screen, keyboard and player) and that they remained in shot while playing their games. While this wasn't always done to perfection, there were no major issues or complaints during the tournament. One important point to come out of an event like this, is that if you wish to run events with players using Zoom (or Jitsi etc), you do need a lot of extra staff. There were 5 officials involved in holding the event, as well as supervisors from the countires taking part.

The list of qualifiers for the finals can be found here. The Girls final is on Wednesday and the Open Final is Thursday. Links to the final should be available at http://asianchess.com/


Gong, Daniel - Parle, Hughston [A45]
Live Chess Chess.com, 31.05.2020