Still no internet access at the site for me, so the blog is happening from home after each day. Today I arrived after having downloaded the games from the tournament site, but when I opened them up there weren't many games. It seems that not too many of the kids recorded their games on the computer terminals provided, so I volunteered to upload some games, and some others also joined the fun. I seem to remember a previous tournament having a neat handwriting prize, and I think that should be re-introduced!
Anyway, what with uploading games and analysing some games of my students, the first half of the day seemed to disappear, and with few games to look at from the event I haven't seen much chess content outside my students games (and a couple of games from Wijk aan Zee, though that doesn't seem as important as the tournament I'm involved with at the moment!). So I was walking around the venue when it suddenly struck me that there must be quite a few ex-Australian Junior Champions hanging around as coaches, organisers, visitors or maybe even parents. So I went to look for some...
While the current Australian Junior Champion is actually defending his title, Zong Yuan Zhao was the most recent champion (2001) I could find. The very approachable current Australian number 1 ranked played is part of the New South Wales team here, and as can be seen by the photo, he lives on a healthy diet of yogurt and Victorian blood!
My apologies go to Stephen Solomon (Australian Junior Champion 1980) and Daryl Johansen (Australian Junior Champion 1977) whose pictures have been in my blog before, and to IM's Robert Jamieson and Guy West who I assumed wrongly had been champions in the past, and then put my foot in it by asking them! You can find a list of champions on the Australian Chess federation's website, along with other Australian Champions.
It's good to see previous winners at the event!
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