Northumbria Masters, 26-30 August

 It's been a busy month for title-norm tournaments in England, and after the events in the South-East and the Midlands, it was now the opportunity of the North to see what it could do, and this arrived in the shape of the Northumbria Masters in Newcastle, organized by Tim Wall.

Unlike the previous two events, which were small tournaments with just ten players in total, this was a full chess festival; not only did it have two title-norm all-play-alls, it also had four other nine-round Swiss sections, in which a total of 191 players played.

Both the all-play-alls yielded title norms. The winners of the GM norm section are names that readers of this blog should find familiar: Conor Murphy and Ravi Haria, winners of Muswell Hill and Wood Green respectively. They both picked up GM norms; Ravi's is his third and final norm, and he just needs to get his rating up to 2500 to get the title. The other norm-seeker to get one in the section was Callum Kilpatrick, who got his final IM norm, and also went over 2400 to secure the title.

The IM norm section came down to a final-round decider between Zala Urh of Slovenia and James Moreby of England; a win for Moreby would have won him the tournament and got him an IM norm, while any other result would have given Urh those achievements. In the end, the game was drawn, and Urh got both an IM norm and a WGM norm. A very impressive achievement from someone who started the tournament as bottom seed.

Title norms were also possible from the Masters section, but nobody ended up getting one. IM Brandon Clarke won this section, half a point ahead of four GMs; the tournament's British Championship qualification place went to FM Hamish Olson, who finished equal sixth. (The two players who tied with him, Bao Ngiah Dong and Roland Bezuidhout, may or may not be eligible - if they are, they have also qualified.)



1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Total
1 IM Haria Ravi 2440 England * 0 ½ ½ 1 1 ½ 1 1 1 6½
2 FM Murphy Conor E 2382 Ireland 1 * 0 ½ ½ ½ 1 1 1 1 6½
3 FM Harvey Marcus R 2440 England ½ 1 * 0 1 0 1 1 ½ 1 6
4 GM Fodor Tamas Jr. 2520 Hungary ½ ½ 1 * ½ ½ ½ ½ ½ 1 5½
5 IM Wadsworth Matthew J 2416 England 0 ½ 0 ½ * 1 1 ½ 1 1 5½
6 FM Kilpatrick Callum 2381 England 0 ½ 1 ½ 0 * ½ 1 1 ½ 5
7 GM Turner Matthew J 2509 Scotland ½ 0 0 ½ 0 ½ * ½ ½ 1 3½
8 IM Roberson Peter T 2437 England 0 0 0 ½ ½ 0 ½ * ½ 1 3
9 GM Cherniaev Alexander 2438 Russia 0 0 ½ ½ 0 0 ½ ½ * 0 2
10 IM Eggleston David J 2381 England 0 0 0 0 0 ½ 0 0 1 * 1½






1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Total
1 WIM Urh Zala 2216 Slovenia * ½ 1 ½ ½ 1 1 1 0 1 6½
2 FM Moreby James E 2283 England ½ * ½ 1 ½ ½ 1 1 1 0 6
3 FM Willow Jonah B 2396 England 0 ½ * 1 ½ 0 1 ½ ½ 1 5
4
 FM Han Yichen 2307 Netherlands ½ 0 0 * ½ 1 0 1 1 1 5
5
 IM Large Peter G 2335 England ½ ½ ½ ½ * 1 0 ½ ½ 1 5
6 FM Claridge-Hansen William 2290 England 0 ½ 1 0 0 * ½ ½ 1 1 4½
7 FM Grieve Harry 2282 England 0 0 0 1 1 ½ * 1 ½ 0 4
8 IM Muir Andrew J 2259 Scotland 0 0 ½ 0 ½ ½ 0 * 1 1 3½
9 FM Gourlay Iain 2342 Scotland 1 0 ½ 0 ½ 0 ½ 0 * ½ 3
10 IM Mckay Roderick M 2258 Scotland 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 ½ * 2½




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Great Players: Ignatz von Kolisch

Image
I first referenced this video in the piece about Alexander Petrov , but it bears another look: You will notice that  Paul Morphy was dominant throughout his entire competitive career, but his reign as world #1 was interrupted briefly by a player called Kolisch, who then almost immediately disappears from the scene. So this piqued my interest: who was this mysterious Kolisch, and why is his name so much less familiar than those of his contemporaries? Well, the answer, on looking at his  Wikipedia article , seems to be that he just had a very short playing career, and did not play much against the big names of his day. This is backed up by his chessgames page , which shows nearly all his games coming in the years 1857-1867. This did, however, include two triumphs in international tournaments. One was the relatively weak Cambridge 1860 event, but the other was the rather stronger  Paris 1867 event, which would also star future world champion Steinitz. This tournament effectively mark
Read more

West is Best at the 4NCL, Rounds 1-2, 22-23 October 2022

 The 4NCL , Britain's only professional chess league, has, like many chess events, been disrupted by the ongoing pandemic. The 2019-20 season was aborted six rounds in; there was no 2020-21 season, and the 2021-22 season was an experimental format for that season only: a Swiss system (chosen so that if it needed to terminate early, the final finishing positions would still be reasonable ones). The twelve teams who finished at the top of the Swiss that year would be in Division 1 in the new 2022-23 season, and my team, West Is Best, were one of the lucky twelve. This was naturally always going to be a tricky season to negotiate, and the way the draw was done meant we could expect a rocky start: the top six finishers of the previous season were paired to face the teams finishing 7th-12th in the first six rounds of the season, thus maximizing the chances of exciting promotion and relegation clashes occurring towards the end. Thus, arriving at the Daventry Court Hotel on the Saturday,
Read more

4NCL Congress, 9-11 July 2021

 So it turns out congress chess has started to make a return, in the shape of the long-running series of 4NCL Congresses . The 25th such event was held in Leamington Spa over the past weekend, and attracted a total entry of 130 entrants across 3 sections. Among the entrants were three grandmasters, Nigel Davies, Keith Arkell and Peter Wells, but none of those players actually won the Open section. First place was instead shared by two strong young players, FM Jonah Willow (19) and CM Aaravamudhan Balaji (16), with 4½/5. Balaji's performance was especially impressive, including a win against Wells and a draw against Arkell on his way to a rating gain of 67.2 points. Arkell finished third on 4 points. I've annotated three of the games; thank you to Jonathan Tait for giving help on how to display them.
Read more