THOUGHTS OF A CHESS ADDICT

Dear members,        As promised we are starting a league of slow games for you who prefer to spend some time thinking about your game. The time control is 1 hour per side. The chief focus is to get members to appreciate the game of chess through the discipline of thinking, planning and strategising.        We will prepare a crosstable which will allow you to play any player at most twice, with alternating colours. The aim is to for each member to play as many games on Fridays. The last round will be on March 30, where we will then add up the total points gained by each member. Prizes will be given to the top 3 placings.        All members please write to me at johnwong@pacific.net.sg to register. The closing date fot registration is Feb 1 2012.

In view of the coming Lunar New Year festivities, please be informed that we are closed today and will resume practice on 27 Jan NEXT Friday HAPPY LUNAR NEW YEAR  

It was a fun-filled and no-incidents day at the Thomson Club Championships, althought some players who signed up for the Seniors ended up at the Juniors instead due to a mis-categorisation at registration. I apologise to all for this and we will do better next year. Tan Wei Liang showed and won the Seniors with 6.5/7 after some months of inactivity. Many of his games were filled with complications but experience told in the end. Here's a happy Tan Wei Liang, with tournament chief arbiter Christopher Lim , presented with the Jimmy Ng Challenge Trophy for the Senior's Champion. The Junior's Section was approximate in numbers to the Senior's with 44 entries. This was the total number of entries for the whole tourmament last year! So it was a blessing that many chose to take part. Some of the top Juniors wanted to play in the Seniors, like Ashvin, Tommy, Qing An and I truly admire their desire to play against stronger opponents without worrying about whether they will event

85 entries have been received at closing for our Annual Thomson Chess Club Championship. All are now members of the club and are free to come by every Friday to our weekly practice sessions starting  7pm. We are giving away books and some trophies as prizes. Winners get first pick from a selection of 30 books displayed throughout the tournament. The aim is to encourage chessplayers to read about the game and foster their knowledge and skills on their own apart from relying on lessons. It has been proven that knowledge gathered through reading will always stick. This event will be SCF rated and we will try to put up the starting list on Friday.

A friend asked if there will be anyone interested in buying his used (near new) copy of   Interested parties can email me at johnwong@pacific.net.sg. Each book is under $30.

Most of the students were inactive in the 4th quarter, so here's the ones registered changes at the Jan 2012 rating list: With the exception of Hui Ling (who will undoubtedly see a jump when her rating is calculated in March thanks to her good performance at the last tournament), the rest registered healthy increases, notably Shi Hao's 124 pt increase thanks to his consistently good performance throughout the Queenstown and Rating Tournaments in Dec. Mitchell's Queenstown performance netted him 71 pts. while Visakan got his 49 pts from the Children's Day tournament. Same goes for Samuel at the last Children's Day tournament. I am heartened by their scores and hope that they will keep this up at the tournaments this year.

Shi Hao garnered points from the unrated players like himself but lost against the rated Indians and a very strong Chinese Zhou Xiangheng. 3 wins, 3 draws and 3 losses is a satisfactory result for his first International outing. Though 2 of the games could have been saved if he had studied the opening more and played slower in the first 10 moves, as he lost pieces due to simple tactics and was not familiar with the lines he played. Hui Ling was the surprise of the group, getting 5.5 / 9. She even managed to win against Breasha Gupta of India  Though she scored only 0.5 from the first 2 days, she steeled herself to coast a winning streak of 5 wins till round 8. At the last game, she fell to an attack by Malaysia's Teh De Zen and lost. In spite of that, she had the best score out of my 6 students taking part. Her result came ahead of several Junior Squad trainees and for that, she should rightfully be very proud of her successful first International outing. Though he managed a smile