Who'd be an Arbiter (or other Chess volunteer...): May 2011

Sunday, 15 May 2011

Prestwick Congress, Day 3

I woke up this morning in a cold sweat. I had had a strange dream where Jedward had beaten Blue at the Eurovision Song Contest. Checked the news and it was reality. Oh this is not going to be a good day...

I watched the live streaming from the Eurovision pages. They had a tweet page at the side and I could not stop laughing at the comments. My favourite was "Can someone please tell me where in Europe Azerbaijan is???". I have never fully understood why Israel, Azerbaijan et al are considered Europe by UEFA and so on when when clearly they are not. Ach well, something for minds greater than mine to resolve.

When I woke up this morning at 5:30. My first thought was "Why am I doing this to myself!". I am spending about 4 hours each day to travel about 50 miles in total. It takes me about an hour to get into Glasgow and just over an hour to get back out. Remind me again why we are being encouraged to use public transport

I'll be fine once I have got started, motivation levels are low this morning. I know once I get there and start winding up people I'll be raring to go :D

To say that today was eventful is an understatement. My surmising above was correct, when I got there and got into it I felt really good and got into the swing of things in no time whatsoever. I was privileged to witness one of the funniest games of chess I will ever see. The game was between David Deary and David Gillespie. They would make a couple of moves then retire to the bar downstairs. The person on move would pop up, make his move and then tell the other on return what his move was and how long on the clocks! I have proof that they were actually at the board at the same time

Who's Round is it?

Would it surprise you if i said the game ended in a draw?

This afternoon was memorable for other reasons. Thankfully everything is fine and I am really glad about that. I was chatting to the Milton and McCusker families, having a laugh as we had done for most of the weekend when Donald came out of the playing hall and asked me to go in immediately as we needed a First Aider. I could tell from the look on his face that this was serious and went in. One of the players had taken ill and required my assistance. Another player was a doctor and assisted me in getting him out of the room (at the players request!) and we sat quietly with him. David had run down for a First Aider from the Airport itself and they attended. Everything was fine and a paramedic arrived to check over. Paul drove back with the player to make sure they were alright and I had a message from them to let me know they were ok. A very happy ending to what could have been a nasty incident.

I'm not ending on a low so here are the winners from this weekends event

Saturday, 14 May 2011

Prestwick Congress, Day 1 and a half

Discussion during a break today at the Prestwick congress, vulgar fractions.

Vulgar is probably how this player felt after a mad dash to get here on a Friday night, sit down at your board and this happens...

Play Online Chess

Painful to say the least!

Well here we are well into the brand spanking new Prestwick Congress. We are playing in the Aviator Lounge overlooking the Ryanair terminal. Not sure if we are allowed to look at the Ryanair planes or if we are charged to do so. I'll take the risk.

Contrary to popular belief, the Ryanair planes do take off forwards....

Ok, enough of the Ryanair jokes. They do a good job on that themselves..

As the title says this is day 1 and a half, the reality is it is day 1 and 2 but as we finished so late on day 1 and I was up so early on day 2 it feels like 2 days combined. They joys of not getting my licence.

There is a good turnout for the event and I sincerely hope that it will be a fixture on the calender. Lets face it, there are not that many venues that you can fly to!

The campaining for next seasons event has started in earnest, we have even set up a page for the Ayrshire players that did not enter this year. A preview follows...

Enter or Else!!!

On the junior front, the adults are still suffering with good results for several of them including Carl Milton, drawing with an opponent about 1000 points higher then his grade.

Hot on the heels of my disaster at the West of Scotland when a cheap memory card procured from Ebay decided it wanted to corrupt all my photos, my battery died today. Thankfully I managed to get off a minimum of 70 shots from the 2 rounds!!

We had an interesting disturbance earlier. On inspection, no player complained about the noise, indeed many were keen to join in...

A few people have not turned up for round 3, we suspect they could be on their way to Dublin. Who says chess is boring!

EK Open 2011 - I do not belive it...

New years resolution was that I was going to keep this blog up to date. Best made plans of mice and men..

I am seen by others as an excellent organiser which makes me smile, I smile as I know that I am a graduate of the school of procrastination. Actually I am probably being unfair on myself as what tends to happen is something comes along that is even more interesting which I then focus my energies on.

The most frequent question I am asked is on computer pairings. Why is it that I have not written an algorithm that does pairings correctly? The reason for me is simple. The day that I have to rely on a computer to do my draws is the day I'll give up completely...

Anyway, to the main thrust of todays blog (which I am doing on a bus heading to the Prestwick Congress). Have you ever seen something and thought to yourself, I'm glad I didn't have to deal with that one? A good friend and arbiting mentor of mine IA Alex MacFarlane was selected to be an arbiter at the Challengers matches for the World Championships. Basically only the World Championships themselves hold higher prestige and Alex fully deserves the recognition he is given. Last week, Vladmir Kramnik was playing in a sudden death playoff. The clocks had roughly 15 seconds left and for some unknown reason, they reset themselves.

As you can imagine, chaos ensued 18 minutes later, the game resumed (not after Alex suggested to VK and the Chief arbiter that they toned it down as it as disturbing the players in his game). The story was major news in the chess world. I was so glad I did not have to deal with that one!

Fast forward a couple of days and I am the sole arbiter at the East Kilbride Open, 58 players, one arbiter. It is what I refer to as "good odds". Normally I like to have a second arbiter there as backup, but Peter was unavailable and all the others were playing so I just continued.

We are approaching the time control and I have 2 games that are in the throes of time scramble. Game 1 is Jimmy Doyle v Ian McLachlan, game 2 is Alastair Macgregor v David Congalton. David is desperately short of time and his flag is threatening to fall (in the metaphorical sense as we are using digitals). I am splitting my attention between the 2 games as at any minute I am either going to have to call flagfall or start writing moves down.

Jimmy's game went into full scramble mode, no player was recording. I start to record and glanced back at Alastairs board when I hear BLEEEEEEEEEEEP. Recognising the sound I turned round in horror to find Jimmy's clock had done a "Kramnik" and had reset!!!

Apparently I swore audibly. I have no recollection of it, but I am looking at the clock thinking "you are having a laugh!". I had missed a couple of moves as I was watching 2 games so I had to do the only thing possible, revert to the last known position and play from there.

We reconstructed the game on the board next to us and with the moves I wrote down managed to completely reconstruct the game. I awarded both players an extra minute for the disturbance and set the clocks to 16 minutes and let them play on. Total time to resolve... About 5 minutes. I also mentally noted to award myself a stiff whisky when I got in!

What are the odds of that? I have arbited over 10,000 boards and never in my arbiting career have I heard of that never mind had it happen to me and there it happens twice in a week!!

I Do Not BELIEEEEEEVE it!