THOUGHTS OF A CHESS ADDICT

Here's the results for the Toa Payoh West CC Tournament  Under 13  Here    Under 7   Here     Under 8  Here    Under 9  Here                     and of course,  the OPEN is already published here                

We've started the first of our 8 training days for the coming Singapore International Youth Tournament. It lasts 4 hours per session (designed to stretch the players to cope with the first 4 hours of play). Quite a fair bit done with vision drills, followed by solving tons of 2-3 move tactics. I'm harnessing the wisdom of Michael De La Maza and Dan Heisman, thanks to their insights I've incorporated their advice on working on chess-playing ability rather than stuffing more chess knowledge at this point. Training Day 2 promises to be gruelling, with more puzzles, more intense visualisation tasks ahead. Sorry but there will be no photos as the competitors's names and faces are confidential at this point. Players who have done well were rewarded with a good bowl of lotus root soup with rice plus kit kat too between breaks. Not a dull moment !

Lately there was talk of a group of parents wanting to appeal to the MOE for chess to recognise as an official sport. Though I commend the noble effort of the group, some doubts linger in my mind: How does having more children playing chess raise the stature of the game here in Singapore? How does it increase the popularity of the game here? Will chess be as popular as that in Indonesia, India and other countries? Here is my opinion. Throughout the countries that are promoting chess from age 6 onwards, we have several institutions like Chess-in-the-Schools program, the Susan Polgar academy in the US, while in the UK Michael Basman and Malcolm Pein also championed the Chess in Schools & Communities project . Lately we have Kasparov starting Chess for Schools in the EU. The Scholastic chess ( chess in primary and secondary school) model is being seen as the most likely model to propagate chess interest amongst the populace. Sadly, the results of these noble efforts do not commensura

I've got several of my students to take part in this, with no expectations as I wanted them to enjoy playing after such a long break from chess because of the exams. In all, the stronger students did not disappoint, while others played to enjoy themselves in spite of the mistakes. Shi Hao's game against the winner of the Open, Ashwin, was rather close from the opening to the middlegame. He had surprised Ashwin with the Danish Gambit which was declined. Generally when a player declines  a gambit, it implies a psychological victory to the gambiteer but probably the more prudent choice when one is not prepared to enter the battle a pawn up. I viewed the game vaguely where White was training his heavy pieces on Black, thought it went well but was told later that Shi Hao lost.  After a day's battle, Visakan came in 4th with 6/7 pts.    Joshua was very much himself, playing with his hands rather than his eyes on the board, made the usual mistakes but won some games against like-m