THOMSON CUP - SILVER SECTION REPORT

  

This is what everybody came for..the 10 main and 5 merit prizes, with cash prizes limited to the top 5 and books/New in Chess magazines (the latest copy) sponsored by the Chess People. Special thaks to FM Lim Hoon Cheng for his contribution.









Here we see last year's winner of the Silver Section, Mr Ambat Sasi Nair battling it out against Aldrin Wong, a regular tournament participant who enjoys playing chess especially with longer time controls. Many parents I spoke to remarked that they much prefer the longer time control as it does not hurry the children to finish their games and allows them time to record the full game. Sad to say, only Thomson and Queenstown CCs offer this format of tournaments which used to be the norm before 25 min time control was introduced.

My VS boys were asked to play the tournament as part of their duties as school team players. They fared reasonably well overall, but definitely need some work in the ethics department. One left the tournament at Round 6 just because he has only scored 3 pts. None of the arbiters was informed. This is irresponsible behaviour as his quitting the tournament (once started) has robbed his opponents of the Solkoff tie-breaks and will affect their placing. No one should quit a tournament once they have started Round 1 precisely for this reason.

Three players I am really impressed with are the ones shown on the right - Issak, Cyrus and Matthew in the background. They chose to play in the Gold Section and though it was tough every single round, no one walked about during the course of the 2 hours and were duly focussed on their games. They have certainly set a model example for many of the children who were playing in the Silver and most of them were wandering around after finishing their games in less than 30 minutes. Credit goes to them and their trainers at Chesskidz for their discipline and positive attitude.

Generally my students fared reasonably except for Adrian who blew his chances in finishing top 5 with a simple calcuation mistake against Tan Jun Hao, before missing a mate in 1 against Roy Lau. The others were basically not accustomed to thinking about their moves given the extra time and lost against more experienced players. Playing for more than 25 minutes is a different ball game from the usual rapid time control and this has to be acquired through practice.

Hopefully, we can get enough funds to get electronic clocks next year to run the entire tournament with incremental time controls.