Commonwealth Chess Championships - Day 1. Really??? This early??

I'm sitting on the bus home writing this musing over a hectic day.  Round 1 has come and gone with few if any incidents.  For that I am eternally grateful.

The day started at 5:30am, a wee bit on the early side.  The time was needed to get the boards cleaned up ready to let the Juniors loose on them.

8am and people started streaming in.  That is a novelty, at your standard Scottish Congress, 1 hour before play starts it is usually the Arbiter and Tournament Organiser, in fact if someone appears more than 30 mins before play, we are usually checking our watches in worry that we are running late.

We got all the Juniors onto live boards and with a bit of WiFi magic, managed to broadcast the entire competition.

Lets meet the Scotland Junior Squad!

Wait a minute, haud the front page.  What does it say on Stuthi's namecard??? 

 So we have a spy in the camp!  Need to keep an eye on that one :p


Last game finished just after 1pm giving us about an hour to get everything ready for the afternoon games.  I knew it was warm in there as Jamie (our resident Aus Arbiter) took his jacket off and for the first time since Friday, stopped shivering!

Must look out my thermal t-shirt for him...

Agent Murphy decided that he would take a hand and with 5 minutes to go we were missing boards 6 - 15.  Didn't matter what I did, they would not connect.  Thankfully Dave noticed I had kicked out the power supply!!!!  We got the links up as fast as we could but it was still a good hour before we had all 84 names on the boards!

One of the interesting aspects of the heat is the rate of discharge from the batteries in the wireless boards.  I am grateful I have two complete sets!   Definite proof of heat exhaustion.


To close this fine evening, here is the venue when it is full, I'm off to have a look a the PGN files as the noticeboard contingent have decreed that there must be files for everyone to look it.

Till tomorrow...