Commonwealth Chess Championships Day 4 - Did you know....

I was standing discussing the monstrous game from last night that nearly broke the boards when one of the ladies commented that she had never seen so many ladies playing in a tournament in Scotland before.  That got me thinking (always a bad idea).  So just how many ladies are there in this field.

Off I went with my wife's trusty camera (mine is in the shop...)  and decided to find out

 

 

 

 

 

 I make that 27!!!  Really good turnout by the ladies this year.  Quite a few of them are around the top boards at the moment which is always good to see! (if I missed anyone, I apologise, I tried to get everyone!)

Well while we are at it, we may as well take a look at who is dwelling on the top boards

 

Good to see a Scot there!  C'mon Colin!!

On the norm chasing hunt, things are looking very interesting.  Our up and coming players are all currently in the hunt.  Please let this be the year one of them does it.  They have come so close so many times, they deserve it.

It had to happen and today it did.  One minutes I am working away, the next my system totally froze as it was transmitting games!  I am so glad I can pull the games back from the boards, that was a close one!

Tomorrow is round 5 and things start to get spicy with everyone jockeying for position.  Expect some fireworks on the board! 

Commonwealth Chess Championships Day 3 - The Longest Game

168 moves!!!  Really 168 moves! Here is the proof

Still don't believe me?

Here is a snapshot of the start of the game

and another as they finished...

Alex was starting to panic, we had to be clear by 8pm.  Sleeping bags were called for!

What a day it has been!  Busy busy busy.  We found the following on 5 of the live boards

I suppose we should be grateful that they at least got it the right way around.  Not best pleased.  We are going to clean it off with some spirits (or was it we were going to drink the spirits and use sandpaper, I forget...)

We had a couple of visitors today, and one of them was seen to be doing the unthinkable!

Now I'm sure we all recognise the Gentleman on the left and to see Donald playing chess again is brilliant (he won by the way!).  In the other pic, we had the G'vnor of the College making the ceremonial first move!


Jamie has asked me to post a better picture of him.  I noticed that his pic has attracted more hits than any other of those taken so far. 

Glad to oblige :D

Apparently the Chess Journos are complaining that the pgns are a bit slow in getting out.  Didn't help that Alex's computer doesn't like uploading them and refused point blank to let us change one  with the correct one.  Had to log in with my pc to sort it and his pc is now been sent to the naughty step.  I am flattered that the journos have finally realised there is an event on, we have been telling them for the best part of 9 months but no one was interested...  Where were you then???

Ah well, back at the venue in 11 hours time.  Please everyone, no 100+ move games tomorrow :D

Commonwealth Chess Championships - Day 2 Fight! Fight!

I have competition and its not fair!   I am up against a published writer!  Andy Burnett is also publishing a blog on the championships!  Andy's Blog.

Beware of Bloggers!

I asked a few players what they thought of the idea.  I could not print what was said, but the looks say it all!!

To be fair, Andy is a terrific writer and I will certainly be following his blog (hence why I have given it a plug here!)

What can I say about today, well I can summarize it in three letters.  T, H and O.  I have been in some warm venues before but today really topped them all.  Trying to explain to our visitors that this is not normal for us and we are going to have a hosepipe ban soon unless it rains....

I asked Jamie what he thought.  He could not stay in the room for more than an hour (we were in 30 minute shifts).  Tomorrow will definitely be shorts weather.  Not managed to work out how to expain Taps Aff to our visitors, it is lost in translation.  It has to be bad when an Aussie can't handle the heat!

Jamie!

The coolest person in the place was our very own Principle Arbiter, Ken Stewart.  He never flinched and was probably the only person, player or arbiter who did not step out of the room for a blast of cool air!

Heat, what heat!

There was a disturbance in the force today, it was like two players having a loud disagreement in the middle of the hall at the end of a game...  I was sitting in the office cooling down when Alex popped in to tell me there had nearly been a fight at the end of a game.  Typical, wasn't in the room at the time :D

My hatred of computer pairings came to the fore today when in the U16 section it wanted to give a player a second bye.  Computers should not be allowed to do pairings! 

Well that's it for today.  Lets see what tomorrow brings (hopefully some cooler weather!)

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...

Commonwealth Chess Championships 2014 - Set up day

Hard to believe that 6 years ago I sat in an AGM and stated my desire to bring a top tournament to Scotland.  Even harder to believe in less than 3 days time it will have started!  Alex has worked so hard on this, I really want it to go well!

Today was setup day for the Championships. at the time of writing we have 154 in the open section and another 60 odd in the juniors.  What is really pleasing is the numbers from other shores.   If you are reading this, welcome to Scotland!

9am, I arrive at the venue and we begin the task of setting up for 160 determined chess players.  It isn't as simple as 80 boards and sets.  God I wish it was.  W  e have 8 wireless and 35 wired DGT boards available to us and getting all that working is a mammoth task.  To give an idea (and maybe dispel a few myths that it is easy to do this!) We have 5 computers driving the boards with a desktop driving the wireless displays.  It feels like there is about 2 miles of cable and 38 connectors each having to be tested lest it brings down that particular string of boards.


Here is what the playing venue looks like at the start of the day

Nice and easy :D  

When I arrived, I did a scan of the wireless frequencies to work out what channel to put the wireless boards on.  Here is what I am faced with!

The channels are Zigbee channels which use the same 2.4GHz as wireless.  Someone want to tell me where in the name of  Iris I am supposed to put the boards??  I did a waterfall scan for an hour and worked out 15 was the least congested and improvised an aerial!

Yep that is a basketball net.  Using this I can get about 15 meters range.  Just enough to get all 8 boards!   Phew!!

We have 5 arbiters this year.  2 from Scotland, 1 who is joint English / Scottish, 1 from Australia and 1 from India.  Jamie (from Australia) is complaining it is too cold, and there is Alex and I sweating in the heat!!!

We needed to be clear by 5, here is how it looks at the moment

 There is a mass of cables I need to tieup on Monday before play starts.  Last thing we need is people tripping and damaging the boards, I mean hurting themselves.  Will be in at 7am. 

As always will be doing a daily blog with my usual twisted sense of humour so tune in.

Hope you all enjoy the coverage and will "speak" to you during the week :D

Winter Chess Festival

I hate it when you have a song stuck in your head...  I do

"Oh Tweedle Dee Oh Tweedle Dum.
The tune McDougall always used to hum
While he was fighting his rival clan McGregor
Dishonour he would never the tartan of his clan."

Damn you Middle of the Road...

It has been far too long since I last put thoughts to paper and one of my resolutions for next year is I am going to do it more often.

This week I am at the Winter Chess Festival in Edinburgh.  This has to be one of the more strange tournaments I have done.  I have lost my voice!  Last two days I have had to get the TD to do the announcements for me (quite embarrassing).  His offer today was "Andy hasn't fallen out with you...."

Karen has been a star.  I was really ill yesterday.  She insisted on driving me to the venue.  I realised how ill I was when I fell asleep in the car (that never happens!)

Tournament has been really good and we have a couple of the players well on track to get an IM norm.  Will be brilliant if we get that.

Hope you all have a really good new year and will see you all in 2014!