Queen control

Women chess players are a force to reckon with.

I RECEIVED an e-mail during the weekend from a reader who signed himself off simply as Jefri. He was commenting on my coverage of the national chess closed championships which ended recently.

I will just relate this pertinent part where he said: “Why was there almost no coverage of the women’s championship? You wrote so much on the men’s event but you only gave a brief mention of the women’s tournament.”

Obviously, he was referring to this paragraph where I said: “The winner of the women’s event was never in doubt. Alia Anin Bakri was simply too good. She powered her way to win the national closed women’s championship rather easily.”

Jefri, you are correct, of course. The women’s championship only got a one-paragraph mention last week but it was not because I had anything against women’s chess. If you have been reading this column closely in the past weeks, you would have seen that there was no slight to the women chess players in this country. In fact, I have written a lot about them.

But it so happened that the race for the national closed championship was too exciting. It was a wide, open field. At the end of the day, anyone could have won the title but it ended with 15-year-old Edward Lee carrying the day.

Oops, there I go again, spouting about the national closed. I stand guilty. Anyway, getting back to the women’s championship, Alia, one year younger than Edward, won it almost at will. That was how good she was. The women’s field included two former women’s champions but in this event, they were against an irresistible force.

Just consider this. As early as the end of the fourth round, Alia was already the sole leader of the tournament, a full point ahead of her closest rivals. In this round, she had beaten former champion Nurul Huda Wahiduddin.

While her rivals struggled throughout the tournament, Alia simply breezed her way through her first five games. It was only in the sixth and seventh rounds that she eased off on the pedal and conceded two draws in succession.

Still, there was a 1½-point gap between Alia and her closest rivals. For a seven-round event, 1½ points is a wide margin. It’s like the difference between the first and last runners in the 100m dash in athletics.

Even then, the results could have been closer and less flattering to the winner. After her draw in the seventh round, Latifah Shamini Latib missed a good chance to be the undisputed runners-up. All that she had to do was to avoid a loss to the former national women’s champion, Khairunissa Wahiduddin.

A draw would have been enough to guarantee Latifah sole second place in the standings but the wily Khairunissa showed why, despite her lack of consistency and form, she was a former national women’s champion and still a force to be reckoned with.

At the end, there were six players who all ended up in shared second place. Initially, I couldn’t believe it that in a 20-player field, it was still possible to get almost a third of the players finishing joint second (4½ points each) but there you are, it happened right here, in Malaysia, in our own national women’s closed championship.

Eye on the game

HOW do you concentrate in chess? Obviously, different people concentrate in different ways. At the national closed championships, two 10-year-old kids demonstrated their own special styles of concentrating at the chess board.

Ten-year-olds Puteri Rafiqah Fahada Azhar (left) and Yeoh Li Tian (right)

Puteri Rafiqah Fahada Azhar prefers to sit upright at the board, sometimes kneeling on the chair to get a better look at the game and her chess clock, while Yeoh Li Tian seems to stare into space, sometimes resting his head on the table while he ponders over his next moves.