Scottish Chess Championship Day 2 - A Pleasant Surprise

One of the annoying things with this years Scottish, is I am away from my family.  Not that I see them much during the Scottish anyway, but I am still normally around in the morning.  What doesn't help is I travel a lot for work and in the lead up, I was away the Tuesday and Wednesday.

I have a fantastic wife.  I knew she was coming up today to see me and drop off some clean clothes.  The kids came with her :)  Totally brightened up my day to see the three of them :D

With the producers of Minecraft being one of the sponsors for the all play all, and both my kids avid players (personally I cannot stand the game) it would have been a waste not to get a photo of them..

We got the rest of the boards wired in today.  Unfortunately we are not able to use the wireless boards due to the amount of electronic fog.  We are struggling to get the TVs to connect wirelessly as well!

The extended boards gave us probably one of the best checkmates so far and I will be surprised to see a better one.

FM Tim Wall was taking on William Rutherford.  Here is the position after move 28.  Black has just played Kh6

White follows up with 29.Nf7+ giving black only Kh5

Now 30. Rg5+, saccing the rook Bxg5

Mate in 1.  31 Ng3#

Beautiful mate.  Well done Sir!

It is round 3 in the all play all.   After day 1 producing almost all draws, there has hardly been any in sight.  Probably the highlight for me was Keti's win V Keith Arkell.  A very instructive game and I would highly recommend having a look at it!

Unfortunately we have been unable to get the PGNs out.  The computer Alex uses seems to have a terminal fault.  I have promised I would take a good look at it tomorrow but on cursory examination, I suspect something is shorting on the board (either that or his junk collection is too big!).  The plan for tomorrow is to spend the morning fixing the computer then the afternoon entering the games.  Not an easy process for me as the software is on my tablet which is running the live boards.  I have to connect into the tablet from my laptop and do it remotely.  Ah the joys :D

All going well, Rounds 1 and 2 will be up tomorrow and 1-3 for the APA.  We will not be able to host them on the CS website as it doesn't like the extension, so anyone looking for them, go to the Championship website.  I'll stick a link in from the front page when we get them up (probably around 6pm ish on Monday).

Well that's all for today, lets see what tomorrow brings (hopefully some cooler weather!)