2011 Australian Player of the Year

Deciding the 2011 Chessexpress Australian Player of the Year was quite tough. There wasn't a dominant performance I could look at, but there were a number of fine achievements throughout the year. In the end three young players seemed to stand out.
Firstly IM James Morris had a very good Bangkok Open early in the year, and then won the Australasian Masters at years end. FM Max Illingworth finished equal 3rd in the 2011 Oceania Zonal, scored an IM norm at the Bangkok Open, and then finished his European adventures with a GM norm in Hungary.
However it is a third player I've decided to go with. IM Moulthun Ly started the year tying for equal first with GM Zong Yuan Zhao and IM George Xie in the Australian Open (after kind of tying for first in the Gold Coast International). He then tied for third on the 2011 Oceania Zonal, before embarking on the Northern Hemisphere chess journey. While overseas he picked up enough rating points to move past the 2400 mark and confirm his International Master title. So congratulations to IM Moulthun Ly for being the 2011 Chessexpress Player of the Year.

Timman,Jan (2575) - Ly,Moulthun (2369) [E63]
Open NK 2011 Dieren, Netherlands (2), 20.07.2011

I still think this is weird

The San Sebastian tournament, celebrating the 100th anniversary of the celebrated win by Capablanca, is trying a different format from most chess tournaments. In fact it is taking an existing format, the knockout, and modifying it to repair a perceived weakness.
Having discovered that the player with the white pieces in the first game has a slight edge in progressing to the next round, the players are required to play both their games simultaneously. Two players, two boards, one with white, one with black. This way the advantage of starting with the white pieces goes away.
Of course the drawback is that you cannot concentrate on just one game, and I suspect trying to manage two games at once may cause a new set of problems.
But if you want to find out more about the tournament, and the format, Chessvibes has a comprehensive report of the first few days.

2011-12 Australian Championship - Day 3

Based on the rudimentary theory of Swiss tournaments, the first log2N rounds (where N is the number of players) are the knock-out phase, while the rest of the rounds are more like a round robin. If this is so, then the Australian Championships will be a KO until the first rest day (after round 5).
However the first three rounds have been completed without anyone making it to 3/3, so the KO may need an extra round to deliver a sole leader. Two of the top board clashes were draw (IM Smirnov v GM Zhao and IM Ly v IM Wohl) while IM George Xie joined the leaders on 2.5 with a win over IM James Morris. There are another 8 players on 2/3, including a few who recovered from first round losses.
In the Reserves tournament Ian Rout and Tony Davis are the only players on 3/3, and they play tomorrow. Another 12 players share third on 2.5, so it will be a few more rounds until a tournament favourite breaks clear.
Visit the tournament website for links to various bits of tournament information, including standings, pairings, and game files.

Through the Maginot Line

My post about sharing analysis from last week obliquely referred to the game below. As the game was still in progress at the time I could not show it, but it has since been completed, I can now post it here.
Again I wheeled out the Sorensen Gambit in the Advanced French, aiming for a direct attack against the king. After move 11 I had ideas of sacrificing the knight on d5 and pushing e6, but 12.Qf3 was a little finesse that I found in a couple of previously played games. After that is was about bringing pieces into the attack with tempo, before another sacrifice (Rxc6) helped finish the game.

Press,Shaun - Manley,Jason [C02]
Chess.com, 28.12.2011

2011-12 Australian Championship begins

The first round of the 2011-2012 Australian Championship has been played, with some of the top seeds already finding it tough going. Second seed IM George Xie drew with Domagoj Dragicevic, as did GM Daryl Johansen with Laurence Matheson. FM Bobby Cheng and FM Michael Steadman were the two players on the top half of the draw to drop full points, to Yi Liu and Jason Tang respectively.
Top seed GM Zong Yuan Zhao had the easiest game of the round, due to communication problems. FM Bill Jordan had missed the deadline for entry, and applied late to play (apparently illness prevented him submitting an entry on time). Although his entry was accepted by the Australian Chess Federation, he was not informed of this, and turned up to the tournament an hour after the start to find he had been paired with Zhao, and had already lost the game.
The tournament arbiters are posting the results and pairings for both the Championship and Reserves at chess-results.com. The links will take you there.

Once again I've missed Hastings

At some point in my life I will make sure I am in England over the Christmas break, if only to play in the Hastings tournament. I suspect this won't be happening until I retire, so for now I continue to follow it from afar.
This years tournament has 113 players (so far), with a large number of GM's. The tournament website proudly announces that they will be hosting the worlds first FIDE rated blitz on the 2nd of January, the day after the new FIDE regulations for Blitz and Rapid come into effect.
If you wish to keep track of the event, then here is the tournament website. As for who will win, I think it will be a race between the top two seeds Yue Wang and David Howell, with victory going to the home town player.

Tis' the season for puzzles

Chessbase is once again running its Christmas Puzzle competition. A few years ago it was a trivia competition (and the team of Rogers I., Rogers C., Dunn P. and Press S. managed to pick up a prize), while this year it is more of a problem solving quiz.
The first set of questions, by GM John Nunn, have gone up on the Chessbase website, with new puzzles each day.
For Australian chess players, there is also the regular Xmas quiz in the Australasian Chess magazine, written by myself. After the cruelty of last year (half the puzzles relied on breaking the laws of chess to find solutions), this years quiz is much more straight forward. However I already had one person tell me that one of the questions was too easy, based on an obvious, but incorrect answer. 'That is why there called puzzles' was my reply.