Scottish Championships 2016 - And finally...

It's finally over.  It i 11:45pm, I have just finished and submitted the FIDE grading, put news articles on the Chess Scotland website, sent in the grading (and corrected it as I had made the inevitable mistake), uploaded the photos from the prize giving.  I have 2 jobs left one I am doing now and one I will deal with tomorrow.  I have to combine the pgn file and upload it to FIDE.  Quite honestly I am now in automatic pilot and I know Alex is the same.  For some mad reason I did not take tomorrow off work.  I wish I had as after the last three weeks I am really feeling it.  I suspect I am going to be there in body only.

Well we did it.  Another Scottish Championship completed.  Granted it was not the event we hoped it would be.  We had no idea there was going to be a rail strike and the clockwork orange would be off for a month.  Talk about working against us!

For the first time in a year, I played a graded main list game.  There was a bye in the Minor and I reckoned on having enough time to play the game quickly and still have enough to set everything up.  I sat down at the board and then I realised just how tired I was when my opponent played 1.d4 and I immediately replied 1..d5 instead of my usual 1..Nc6.  Aaarrggh I am playing the Englund Gambit (something I played about 10 years ago with relatively good sucess).  I thankfully won!

Thinking back over the last 9 days, it has been good.  I have enjoyed it.  There has been some incredible performances and some really good chess

I want to thank Lara for suggesting a picture.  At the end she suggested getting the trophy holders together.  Brilliant idea and I'm glad one of us was thinking!

Well we have a champion.  For the 3rd time GM Ketevan Arakhamia-Grant has prevailed and on 7/9 it is quite an impressive score!

The overall winner was GM Matthew Turner on 7.5/9

We had Joint Seniors Champions this year with GM Colin McNab and IM Stephen Mannion sharing the title (the one in the middle is not the Senior Champion, I'd love to know what he said to them!)

Declan Shafi and Murad Abdulla are the Scottish Boys Champions

The Girls Champion is Rachel Smith

And the player of the year was last years Champion, FM Neil Berry

We spent all tournament trying to keep Alasdair and Euan Dawson apart, unfortunately we didn't check the weekend major draw as the last round saw father playing son.  Talk about a lose lose for dad!

As always we are looking for feedback from the players on how it went, things you would like to see done differently and things we can improve.  I did ask Calum...

Well thats all for this year.  Thanks to everyone for a fun tournament and  your kind comments about the blog.  If everything goes to plan (and that will be a first!) we will be in Dundee next year.  Knowing our luck, we plan for Dundee and will no doubt be playing in Hawick!