Interesting mix of players at round-robin tournament.
AFTER the excitement of the Malaysian Chess Festival, the focus of the chess community has turned to the Raja Nazrin Shah invitational masters and international open chess championships at the Swiss Garden Hotel & Residences in Kuala Lumpur.
These two tournaments started on Monday and are now towards their tail-end. There are only three more rounds to be played before conclusion. Today sees the seventh round starting at 9am, and the eighth round beginning at 3pm, while the ninth (and final) round will be played tomorrow morning.
The first event was the Raja Nazrin Shah invitational masters tournament in which the organisers had invited 10 players to the round-robin tournament. Originally, the Filipino grandmaster, Joseph Sanchez, was supposed to play in the invitational but at the technical meeting on Sunday, he agreed to make way for the young Indian international master, Das Arghyadip, who was in search of his final grandmaster title norm.
Sanchez thus found himself competing with 65 other players in the Raja Nazrin Shah international open tournament instead.
The round-robin invitational tournament boasts a rather interesting mix of players. Apart from Arghyadip, the other nine players include grandmasters Nguyen Anh Dung of Vietnam and Singapore’s Dr Wong Meng Kong. Then there are the father-and-son duo of grandmaster Tahir Vakhidov and international master Jahongir Vakhidov from Uzbekistan. The remaining players are all international masters: Richard Bitoon and Oliver Barbosa, both from the Philippines, Nguyen Van Huy from Vietnam, Goh Wei Ming from Singapore and our very own Mas Hafizulhelmi.
As for the open tournament, the number of participants eventually settled at 66. I was told by the tournament director, Peter Long, that he was quite relieved with this number as earlier, he kept getting enquiries from grandmasters and the number of participants had threatened to spill out of control.
As he was organising only one open event, he would prefer to keep the tournament at a manageable number and not turn it top heavy. He reasoned that too many grandmasters playing in the tournament could crowd out the lower-ranked local players whom he was encouraging to take part.
Perhaps he has a point there because this open tournament had attracted 16 local participants that included our current national champion Lim Zhuo Ren and current national women’s champion Nur Nabila Azman Hisham. That’s almost 25% of the field.
Nevertheless, a 66-player field that can boast of enough depth in three grandmasters (Sanchez, Susanto Megaranto and Cerdas Barus), 12 international masters, two woman grandmasters and two woman international masters cannot be that bad, can it?
The two events are organised by the Kuala Lumpur Chess Association with sponsorship from the Masterskill Education Group Bhd under its Educating Malaysia Corporate Social Responsibility programme.