Nguyen Duc Hoa claims first prize in the inaugural Bhopal GM Open. I was just checking the rest of the tournament for the first time as I had not been aware of his presence until the ceremony. He defeated second seed Ivan Rozum in the final round.
Comparing their respective scorecards is quite amusing, although perhaps not for Ivan. Congrats to the winner though, you can only beat those with whom you are paired. He finished half a point ahead of the field on 8.5/10
Second place went to Malaysia’s Yeoh Li Tian, who played a relatively strong field and went through unscathed. Countback helped him to the top of the heap of payers on 8.
Tran Tuan Minh was the player who stopped Timur Gareyev’s locomotive and took third.
GM Suat Atalik, a seasoned professional, made a few quick draws in the middle of the event to conserve his energy and win the last round to secure fourth place. Shailesh Dravid 5th, and Adam Tukhaev 6th, rounded off the players on 8.
Some of the foreign titled players fared less well in the latter half of the tournament. Timur Gareyev, who cruised to 5/5, gave an 11 board blindfold exhibition, then scored half a point from his next 3 games. Alberto David, pictured below enjoying local cuisine with Inna Iasman, lost three on the trot before scraping a win in the final round to finish 34th.
I will try to forget this tournament after doing even worse than Alberto, only making two draws from the last four rounds, finishing out of the very long prize pool. My last round opponent was winning when he offered me a draw, obviously in deference to my (undeserved) title and rating.
It seems that conserving energy is very important in these events with double rounds and morning rounds. Being young may help as well. Maybe not playing in them would be a wise choice.
Mumbai, where I am now, has one round a day, all in the afternoon, and only nine rounds. I have 11.8 rating points to recover and this time there are only 15 prizes instead of the 50 in Bhopal.
Here are the horrid last two games. I again failed to use the ChessBase replayer. It’s much more complicated than the one I used to use at chessvideos.tv. You have to remove text, paste, take lines of code, put them somewhere…..arrgghhhhh. After many attempts, I gave up.
New replayer code added Jan 17 2018 – DCA
Mumbai report coming up next!
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