Olympiad and more

Hello everyone!

I've finally played my first serious game of chess since July. It was a nice win in the London League, albeit against a weaker opponent. It's good to get some practice in though! The game started off as a quiet variation of the Slav but after 24 moves I got this completely winning position. Can you find the moves to finish this game off before looking below for my answer? Black to move:

P. Stokes (163 ECF) - Maria Yurenok (178 ECF)

London League, 30th September 2010

There are more than one ways to finish this game, but I chose:

24...Rf6! With not much time left on the clock I decided on a simple plan - put the rook on g6 creating various threats. And there's not much white can do about that! Of course, b7 pawn is irrelevant and no point taking the rook on f2 as it's not going anywhere.

25. Qe1 Rg6 26. c5 - it's hard to suggest anything for white as he's stuck for moves and has no reasonable defense against my plan.

26...Bh4 - now I'm threatening to win the queen with 27...Rxg2 28. Rxg2 Qh1+ 29. Rg1 Qh3+ 30. Rg2 Bxe1 +- With the clock ticking down white made the final mistake:

27. fxe4?? Qxg2# Don't you think it's a pretty checkmate?

I have two more London League games in the coming week. And I can't wait to play in my next serious tournament in France (Cap D'Agde) at the end of October. I haven't been training much but I do find time to improve my tactics by solving tactical puzzles on my iPhone on the way to work. I have more than 1000 of them to solve, so it will keep me busy for a while J

The past couple of weeks have been very exciting as I've been following games and results of the Chess Olympiad. Ukrainian men won the Open section and Russian women won the Women's section with a round to spare! I'm glad that the Russian women outperformed their Chinese rivals this time. English men didn't do as well as their team ranking, but English women finished 21st despite being seeded 39th - so a good result! Here is a photo from Meri Grigoryan of the English women's team in action.

From left to right: WFM Sarah Hegarty, Kanwal Bhatia, WFM Meri Grigoryan, IM Jovanka Houska. The next international  team competition which will be represented by England is the European Team Championship in the Autumn of next year. Lets see if I can show some good results to get into the team next year.

Work, Work, Work!

The life has been very busy in the past month, mainly because I've gone back to work and have been working a lot!  Although I'm working in the same department as before my sabbatical, I have a new manager and a different job. I always find that first few weeks in a new job demand more effort than usual as I need to learn who my stakeholders are, establish relationships, learn new working practices and processes and convince people that I can make a positive difference. It's important to make a good first impression, especially with directors as they tend to have a very limited attention span! In my job I'm pretty much left to myself to decide what needs to be done and how to do it, so while I've been getting my head around complexities of work I didn't feel like playing any serious chess recently.

I did try to play a bit of chess in August in the Golders Green rapidplay. Unfortunately I had such a bad headache ever since I got up that morning that I had to withdraw from the tournament before the end. I can't remember ever withdrawing from a tournament before! I'm still hoping to play in France at Cap D'Agde at the end of October although I haven't booked it yet. It would be useful to play in some weekend tournament before that but at the moment I can't be sure when I'd feel energetic enough to spend a whole weekend playing chess.

September ratings have come out and I'm up again at 2071 due to my US performance. It would be a shame to lose momentum now as I've been going up in rating all the time since April. One interesting fact is that I haven't lost any slow-play games to anyone lower than IM or GM since the beginning of April (that's when I lost a completely winning game in the London League). Anyway, I'm pretty clear about my new job now so it would be interesting to see if I can dedicate some of my brain power to chess during September. There's one other thing that I haven't quite figured out yet - when is the best time of the day to spend on chess. Should I get up earlier and spend some time on chess before work or should I do some chess after work? I'm certainly not a morning person and it takes me a while to wake up, but doing serious mental activity like chess after a full day of work is quite difficult as concentration is nowhere near perfect.

One great thing which happened in August is that my partner IM Simon Ansell won Dun Laoughaire IM-norm round-robin tournament in Ireland. Although he was the second seed it was still  a nice achievement since he ended up 1.5 points ahead of the field with 7 points out of 9. And the other great thing which happened is that an article was published about my chess achievements in the Intranet-based BT Today news. Unfortunately, only BT employees can access it, but it's a reasonable-sized audience since there are over 100 000 employees in BT! And I got some nice e-mails of encouragement from strangers after the article was published.

I won't be able to publish on this blog as much as I did during my sabbatical as my free time is now very limited, but I will make sure to keep you updated about my performance after every chess tournament.

Pacific Coast Open

I'm back from the USA and suffering from jet-lag. However, there's a million things to do after being away for 3 weeks and on top of that I am going back to work on Friday, for the first time after 10 months of sabbatical! I'm so glad that BT gave me this opportunity to take the sabbatical as I think I had the best 10 months ever despite some low points at some chess tournaments.

My Pacific Coast Open tournament ended fairly well as I got 3.5 points out of 6 (including a half-point bye) drawing last two games against stronger opponents. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to win one of those games with an extra pawn! And I ended up half a point behind a large rating prize. I don't know why in the USA they have very large rating prizes - it was larger than a second place prize! Nevertheless, I'm happy to add another 9 rating points to my FIDE rating despite a slow start to the tournament. My partner IM Simon Ansell did very well by getting a share of the second prize. You can see the final standings here: http://www.chesstour.com/pco10r.htm I didn't have any exciting games to show although I haven't had a chance to analyse them in detail and may yet find something worth showing at a deeper level. I bought a new laptop in the USA so I hope my Rybka will now run even better and faster! J 

New FIDE ratings have come out at the beginning of July and I'm back to over 2000 mark at 2062. ECF ratings have come out as well and I am now rated 178 - a bit higher than a year ago but lower than I believe my current strength is. Unfortunately, ECF ratings are published only once a year and can be a bit misleading for an improving player. British Championship has started on Monday and will keep me entertained for the next 2 weeks. The top seed GM Mickey Adams is the favourite to win the title. Unfortunately, there are only 3 women participating (I decided against playing because of going back to work) so I hope ECF would do something to encourage more women to play in the British.

I haven't got any firm plans for my next chess tournament but I am considering playing my next tournament at the Berks & Bucks congress during the August Bank Holiday weekend. It's a 6-round FIDE-rated tournament. I'll just have to see how tired I'll get being back at work and if I need my weekends to recover rather than play chess! I am also hoping to play in the 9-round FIDE open at Cap D'Agde in the South of France in October.