Round 5 of the 2024 Club Champs
Khishigbataar Bayasgalan (4.5/5) has kept the lead in Division One, with a slender lead of a half-point from John-Stuart Plant. There are quite a few adjourned games in that division though, and the results of those matches could rock the boat when they are played.
Division Two sees Michael Babic and Brian Allison sharing the lead on 3.5, with Graham Saint and Ted Power sitting back on 3. Beydoun Ghassan on 3.5 leads Volkan Soker on 3 in Division Three, with many players lurking on 2.5. It’s Ashton Li in the lead in Division Four, with 3 points, with Sam Sharkawy and Kevin Liu just behind on 2.5. Again, there’s a heap of players waiting to pounce on 2. In Division Five, Huey Teng retains his perfect record, 5/5, leading Peter Swinton on 3 and Aaron Hu on 3. The Division Six deadlock continues with Stephen Manwarring and Ken Eldridge both sitting on 4.5, leading Ethan Currie (3) and Samuel Slingo (2). Zach Lee also keeps his lead in Division Seven, on 4.5, with Anujin Soo on 3.5, and Robert Roszkowski and Dimitrios Gourlas on 3.
Round 4 of the 2024 Club Champs
Khishigbataar Bayasgalan, fresh from finishing as the top-scoring female in the Doeberl Cup, had her third win of the tournament, and maintains her Division One lead with 3.5/4. Close behind is John-Stuart Plant on 3, and Jeremy Plunkett has moved up to sole third on 2.5.
Division Two has three club veterans all in the lead on 3/4: Graham Saint, Michael Babic and Brian Allison. Ted Power still has chances, sitting half a point behind. In Division 3, Ramu Srinirasa now leads on 3/4, with Ghassan Beydoun on 2.5, and Volkan Soker a further half-point back. Division Four is the closest fought of all, with the leader, Sam Sharkawy only on 2.5, and then four players behind him on 2: Ashton Li, Robert Fenton-Lee, Kevin Liu and Darren Curtis. In contrast, Division 5 Five sees the biggest lead of all: Huey Teng, with the only perfect score of the tourney (4/4), leads Peter Swinton on 2.5, with Ralph Mitchell, Aaron Hu and Nihal Scammell all equal on 2. Stephen Manwarring and Ken Eldridge drew in Round 4, and thus became co-leaders of Division 6 (3.5/4), with Ethan Currie on 3 and Samuel Slingo on 2. It’s most youth in Division 7, with young Zach Lee leading the pack on 3.5; being him are Robert Roszkowski and Dimitrios Gourlas on 3 and Anujin Soo on 2.5.
Australia’s Biggest Ever Chess Tourney – Doeberl Cup 2024
Geoff Hyde (thanks to Charles for help and photos)
GM Hrant Melkumyan, far left, winner of the Premier Division. St George player, WCM Khishigbattar Bayasgalan, was the top scoring female. At far right is Rosemarie Doeberl, daughter of the original major sponsor of the tournament, Erich Doeberl.
Confirming the rising popularity of chess in Australia, the 2024 edition of the annual Doeberl Cup yet again broke the record for the greatest number of players in an Australian tournament – 413. Spread across five divisions, the Premier, Major, Minor Mini and U1200, the top division attracted four GMs, eight IMs and 26 other masters of various stripes. Armenian GM Hrant Melkumyan completed a hat-trick of wins to take out the Premier honours yet again, with a score of 8/9. IMs Peng Chen and Arghyadip Das were second and third, both on scores of 7. St George was remarkably well represented in the Premier with 5 of the players currently playing in our Club Championships Division One in attendance; Cedric Koh was also playing. Top scores went to WCM Khishigbattar Bayasgalan and Cedric on 5.5. Khishigbattar was the highest scoring female player in the tournament – many congrats! Jeremy Plunkett and CM Daniel Melamed both scored 4.5, and Terrence Tang ended up with 3.5. For full results of the Premier and other divisions, click here.
In the Major Division, St George had two contrasting players: big tournament debutant Ted Power and veteran Mal O’Donoghue. Ted did very creditably, winning his last three games and scoring 4.5/7; Mal maintained his trademark sense of humour to go with his 3 points.
Kevin Liu and another big tourney novice, Ashton Li, both scored 3.5/7 in the Minor Division, just leading James Bullen on 3. While we had no representatives in the Mini Division, Samuel Slingo played in the U1200s, scoring 2.5/6. His real star turn however was in the Open Blitz Tournament, which is held on the Saturday night. Up against all the top players, Samuel scored 3 points! The Blitz was won by Australian GM Anton Smirnov.
St George was also well represented in the Arbiters, providing three of the nine in the team: IA Charles Zworestine, FA Nick Kordahi, and myself (NA). Despite the many thousands of games played, there were surprisingly few dramas, partly a result of the excellent work done by Tournament Director IA (and FM) Shaun Press and Chief Arbiter IA Alana Chibnall.
I was involved in what turned out to be quite an amusing adjudication. The White player complained that his opponent had initially agreed to a draw (by allegedly nodding his head) but had not sealed the deal, as it were, by then shaking his outstretched hand. The opponent denied nodding any sign of acceptance, and also pointed out that the White player had not added the = symbol to his score sheet, one of the required steps in making a draw offer. When I pointed out to the white player that it would be a bit strange for any opponent to change their mind so quickly, his response was that his opponent was trying to ‘mess with my head’. At this point I called over IA Peter Tsai who came to the same conclusions as me, and said the game should continue. But it was the conversations I later had with Peter about the accused Black player that really added spice to the story. Peter knows the player well, because the Black player is himself an International Arbiter. And not only that, he is one of the four Councillors on the Rules Commission of FIDE! And if you are wondering, the game ended in a draw anyway.
Round 3 of the 2024 Club Champs
The big clash of Rd 3, WCM Bayagalan Khisigbataar versus CM Daniel Melamed, was a nearly 5 hour battle, and took all of 160 moves! It ended in a draw as per the 50 move rule, leaving Bayasgalan still on top of the table with 2.5 points. Sitting close behind are Andriy Peykov and John-Stuart Plant, both on 2.
In Division 2, Michael Babic maintained his perfect record (3/3), but Ted Power is poised just a half-point behind, with Graham Saint and Brian Allison both on 2. Christian Lagarez on 2/3, has taken the lead in Division 3, with four players on 1.5 (Srijan Badam, John Nichas, James Zaverdinos and Ghassan Beydoun). Sam Sharkawy (2.5/3) has a clear point lead over Eli Udovitch, with five players behind Eli on a single point. Huey Teng shook up the Division 5 table with his win, and with 3 points leads Peter Swinton and Aaron Hu on 2. Steve Manwarring has stormed to the top of the Division 6 table, and on 3/3 leads Ethan Currie, Samuel Slingo and Ken Eldridge on 2. Division 7 sees Robert Roskowski on 2 leading Anujin Soo on 1.5 with Soo Tsogbadrakh, Oliver Ametson and Dimitrios Gourlas on 1.
Round 2 of the 2024 Club Champs
In division 1, WCM Bayasgalan Khishigbataar had another convincing win and now sits atop the table by a half point from Andriy Peykov and John-Stuart Plant. Next week she plays black against 2023 club champ CM Daniel Melamed. Could this be the pivotal match-up of the tournament? Division 2 sees Michael Babic on 2/2, leading by a half-point from Jose Escribano and Ted Power. Srijan Badam and John Nichas share the lead on 1.5 in division 3. Likewise for Sam Sharkawy and Eli Udovitch in Division 4. Peter ‘No Sweat’ Swinton is reaping the benefits of his coaching at the Sydney Chess Academy, and with Huey Teng has retained a perfect score in Division 5. Division 5 likewise sees two players on 2/2: Stephen Manwarring and Ken Eldridge. The most evenly-spread results table is that of division 7, with 5 players on 1/2: Robert Roszkowski, Soo Tsogbadrakh, Oliver Ametson, Anujin Soo and Dimitrios Gourlas.
St George Club Champs kicks off with 7 divisions!
For the first time in my time at St George, the Club Championships is running seven divisions. With 66 players registered, divisions 1-3 each have ten players, and 4-7 each have nine. As usual, it’s a single round-robin tournament, so participants in any one division get to play every other player once. In any division with an odd number of players, each player will also have one week where they don’t play, i.e. a bye, for which they will not score any points. Board One featured an exciting 17-year old prodigy from Ulaanbaatur, the capital of Mongolia: WCM Bayasgalan Khishigbaatar. A decisive win over Jeremy Plunkett suggested she will be a force to be reckoned with in the Club Champs, and showed why she has a Blitz rating of 2453 on chess.com.
Results of 2024 St George Quickplay
Our apologies for the delay, but the final crosstable for the recent 9-round Quickplay Tournament is now accessible here. Congratulations to the outright winner, Arthur Huynh who scored 8.5/9! CM Daniel Melamed was a point behind, and club stalwart Sarwat Rewais was third with 7 points. Round by round results are accessible on the results page. There will be divisional awards as well; these will be announced at the annual presentation night towards the end of the year.
March 5: Round 1 of 2024 Club Champs postponed by one week
Due to some very sad news (the death of the mother of our Club Captain, Charles Zworestine), we are postponing Round 1 of the Club Championships until next Tuesday, March 12. Tonight, March 5, there will only be social chess, from 7.30 as usual. We have tried to alert everyone to this late change by email, text or phone.
Charles has asked me to say that if you want to play in the club champs, and you have only expressed interest by sending him an email, text or phone call, then you now need to either: (1) register via the website (link below) or (2) advise me (Geoff Hyde) separately. Any previous expression of interest, apart from registering on the website is now null and void. Charles is basically not checking any past or future personal messages between now and next Tuesday, and he has not compiled a list of names of the people who contacted him personally.
Also: to reduce the stress on Charles next Tuesday night, and to help get the games off to as early a start as possible, please do not wait until next Tuesday to register. Do it now, either on the website, or by advising me personally. Organising people into their ratings division is not an easy task, and if Charles has everyone’s names well before Tuesday, his job is made much less stressful.
I will be there tonight, as will our treasurer, Mark Boan, so if, for example, you do not find it an easy thing to register on the web, you can see us personally then, and pay the annual fees, if necessary.
Club Champs Registration Link
https://stgeorgechess.org/
For anyone wishing to attend the funeral service, all the information is on the Sydney Chevra Kadisha website: https://www.sck.org.au/ – just scroll down. The service will be at their chapel, 172 Oxford Street (corner Wallis Street) Woollahra NSW 2025, at 1:30pm on Wednesday March 6, and will last likely under half an hour. Please advise Charles if attending.
Geoff Hyde
geoffjhyde@gmail.com
0466 904 941
2024 St George QuickPlay Rounds 4-6. Daniel takes the lead.
It was an intense, mano-a-mano finish at board 1 on Tuesday, with CM Daniel Melamed finally prevailing against John-Stuart Plant. They finished long after all the other games had finished. Daniel, now on six points, retained his perfect record and has a slender half-point lead over Arthur Huynh. Anthony Karnaout sits on third with 5 points. Daniel and Arthur square off on board 1 in Round 7 next week. See the crosstable after Round 6 here.
Compared to the first three rounds, upsets were aplenty. The following players had victories against players at least 10 positions above them on the initial ranking list or a draw against a player 20 positions or more above (the number in parentheses shows the difference): Wins: Alex Freitas (R4:30; R6:23). Jing Jia (R6:23; R4:14; R5:12); Ralph Shaw (R4:22; R6:19); Christian Lagarez (R5:19; R6:13); Joel Shreshta (R4:18); Emmanuel Vardakis (R4:17; R6:14); Stephen Elliott (R5:17); Ralph Mitchell (R6:17); Isaac Wang (R4:14); Chris Morkos (R4:13); Ramu Srinirasa (R5:13); Ben Hepworth (R6:12); James Bullen (R5:10). Draw: Nihal Scammell (R5:21).
2024 St George QuickPlay rounds 1-3
Fifty-three players, including many new faces, turned up for the start of our three-week, Swiss-format QuickPlay tournament. A warm welcome to all our new – and returning – members!
In the tournament, players each have 25 minutes for their game and get a 10 second bonus after each move. In a rather cool example of the general reliability of both the ratings and pairing systems, all of the players rated above 2000, and only those players, scored three out of three: Mario Falchoni, Arthur Huynh, John-Stuart Plant, Sarwat Rewais and CM Daniel Melamed. See the crosstable after Round 3 here.
There were surprisingly few upsets across the night. The following players had victories against players at least 10 positions above them on the initial ranking list or a draw against a player 20 positions or more above (the number in parentheses shows the difference): Wins: Ralph Shaw (R1: 26; R2: 25); Nihal Scammell (R1:26); Emmanuel Vardakis (R3: 16); Christian Lagarez (R2: 15); Alex Freitas (R2: 14). Draws: Stephen Elliott (R1: 26); Alex Freitas (R3: 23).
2024 St George Summer Lightning: JSP and the Perfect Score
Reprising his shared 2023 victory, but this time with an even better result, John-Stuart Plant scored a win in each of the 9 games of the 2024 Summer Lightning tournament. Second on 7.5 points was Mario Falchoni, and third place was shared between Sarwat Rewais and Changhao Yu. Thirty-one players took part.
The U1700 and U1500 divisions saw great winning performances by two continuing improvers: Sait Buzgan (5/9) and Samuel Slingo (4/9). Samuel shared the first prize in his division with one of his his practise partners, Ralph Shaw, twice winner of the NSW State Junior Blitz Championships, back in the ’60s.
Final Crosstable
| 2023-24 Summer Lightning Prizes | ||
|---|---|---|
| Open | U1700 | U1500 |
| 1st $80: John-Stuart Plant (9/9) | 1st $45 Sait Buzgan (5.5/9) | Eq 1st $37.50 each Ralph Shaw; Samuel Slingo (4.5/9) |
| 2nd $50 Mario Falchoni(7.5/9) | Eq 2nd $6 each: Srijan Badam; Ghassan Beydoun; Christian Lagarez; Ashton Li; Kevin Liu. (5/9) | |
| Eq 3rd $15 each: Sarwat Rewais; Changhao Yu (6.5/9) | ||
2023-24 St George Summer Open: The Results!
Congratulations to Changhao Yu and John-Stuart Plant, the co-winners of the tournament’s Open division! Third place went to the previously unrated Dominic Ou – his performance rating for the tournament was over 1950. The full list of place-getters in the four divisions are shown below:
| 2023-24 Summer Open Results | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Open | U1700 | U1500 | U1300 |
| Eq 1st $300 each: Changhao Yu; John-Stuart Plant (6/7) | 1st $360: Nikola Vujasin (5/7) | Eq 1st $300 each: Eric Shen; Ralph Shaw (4/7) | Eq 1st $300 each: Emmanuel Vardakis; Scott Zhou (4/7) |
| 2nd $240: Anthony Karnaout (4.5/7) | |||
| 3rd $150: Dominic Ou (5.5/7) | Eq 3rd $50 each: Sait Buzgan; Srijan Badam; Andrew He (4/7) | Eq 3rd $37.50 each: Marcel Lima; Alex Vardakis; James Bullen; Ludwig Wolf (3.5/7) | Eq 3rd $75 each: Ashton Li; Geoff Hyde (3.5/7) |
Prizes will also be announced at the club next Tuesday night (Jan 30). If we don’t have your bank account details already, please send them to boanmark@bigpond.net.au
The following players had victories against players at least 10 positions above them on the initial ranking list or a draw against a player 20 positions or more above (the number in parentheses shows the difference): Wins: Dominic Ou (unrated; 46); Stephen Elliott (unrated; 43); Jason Koh (21); Angela He (10); Draws: Ralph Shaw (23); Peter Swinton (21).
2023-24 St George Summer Open: Round 6 Report
Round 7 Pairings (provisional) Updated Jan 22, 3.57 pm
Update: To help people determine their strategy for the final round, there will be four prize categories: Open; U1700; U1500; and U1300. Unrated players will be sorted to one of these categories based on their performance rating (as determined after round 7), and will then be eligible for a prize in that category. Three prizes will be awarded in each category: 1st: $360; 2nd:$240; 3rd: $150.
It was the calm before the storm last night, with double the number of draws (8) of any previous round. In terms of the leaderboard, a Board 1 draw between John-Stuart Plant and Changhao Yu meant that Arthur Huynh and Pertti Sirkka joined them, on 5/6, in a four-way tie for the top spot. It makes for an especially exciting final round, with another three players on 4.5 (Dominic Ou, Ted Power, and Sarwat Rewais) also in contention to come in equal first.
The following players had victories against players at least 10 positions above them on the initial ranking list or a draw against a player 20 positions or more above (the number in parentheses shows the difference): Wins: Dominic Ou (unrated; 56); Scott Zhou (22); Ralph Shaw (11); Draws: Ashton Li (46); Marcel Lima (29); Ethan Currie (23); Geoff Hyde (22); Christian Lagarez (22).
NB: The organiser for the final round is not Charles, but Geoff Hyde. Contact me, not Charles, for all matters:
geoffjhyde@gmail.com
Ph: 0466 904 941
I will also be one of the arbiters alongside Anthony Karnaout.
Daniel Melamed does well at 2024 Australian Chess Championships
The Australian Open Championships has now finished, and Club Champion Daniel Melamed (FIDE 1988) ended in equal seventh place, on 6.5/11. He scored the surprise win of round 7, beating WGM Julia Ryjanova, rated nearly 300 points higher. GM Ian Rogers covered the exciting parts of Daniel’s game in his round-up of the Round 7 games on YouTube. In Round 8, Daniel scored a solid draw against Samuel Asaka (2125) but lost to Frederick Litchfield (2346), in round 9. In his 10th round match versus WGM Jiling Zhang (2170), he had another strong win.
His final game was the toughest yet, on board 1 as black against tournament winner, IM Rishi Sardana (2470; 9.5/11) from the ACT. The game can be followed here on Lichess, and is partly analysed by GM Ian Rogers on Youtube. Ian points out an interesting but difficult-to-spot resource by which Daniel could have saved the game. Second and third place in the main division went to equal-scoring Yi Liu and Samuel Asaka. In the Australian Blitz Championship, held during the main tourney, Daniel scored 6.5/11. That tourney was won by Tri Kien Le, with Hong Anh Nguyen second. St George was not represented in the other divisions of the Championships, although former club regular Brendan Anderson played in the Australian Reserves division, scoring 6.5/11.
Geoff Hyde
2023-24 St George Summer Open: Round 5 Report
Round 6 Pairings (provisional) Updated Jan 16, 3.05 pm
Round 5 saw two players edge ahead, Chaghao Yu and John-Stuart Plant lead with 4.5/5. But fibe others sit just a half-point behind: Nikola Vujasin, Pertti Sirkka, Gordon Yang (now withdrawn from the tournament), Arthur Huynh and Sait Buzgan
There were fewer upsets on the night. The following players had victories against players at least 10 positions above them on the initial ranking list or a draw against a player 20 positions or more above: (the number in parentheses shows the difference): Wins: Dominic Ou (unrated; 35); Scott Zhou (31); Boris Paceskoski (30); Eric Shen (25). Draws: Ashton Li (39).
NB: For the remainder of the tournament, the organiser will not be Charles, but Geoff Hyde. Contact me, not Charles, for all matters:
geoffjhyde@gmail.com
Ph: 0466 904 941
I will also be one of the arbiters for the rest of the tournament, alongside Anthony Karnaout.
For news from 2023: click here.