MCC Update

Since I moved to Australia about 8 and a half years ago, there have been 4 players who I've had a particularly bad record against. IM Guy West I have never managed to beat, I've scored a few draws, and lost quite a few. FM Dusan Stojic I have managed to win against, and have picked up the odd draw, but I must be at about -6 against him. My record against IM Mirko Rujevic perplexes me as I seem to get decent positions, but his sharp and imaginative sense at the chess board usually allows him to come out of things well. While I've beaten him, and drawn a few, I reckon I'm at -5 at least. And against Malcolm Pyke I have had a bad time. I don't remember the exact score, but he won a whole load back to back. I'm either up, level or no worse than -2 against everyone else I've played in Australia. (A bold announcement and if you are someone I've forgotten, then please don't hesitate to remind me)

Guy West and Dusan Stojic

What made me think about this was seeing the field for the Melbourne Chess Club's latest Monday night tournament, the Malitis Memorial. This mid year 7-round swiss has usually had small turn outs compared to other MCC events, but this year the tournament seems to holding it's own with the previous City of Melbourne Open and a field of 29 players are currently competing compared with 23 for the previous event. The top 2 seeds are from my nemesis group, Rujevic and Pyke and these 2 are currently on 2/2 and in the leading group of the event along with David Lacey, Tom Kalisch and Paul Kovacevic. It's still, of course, too early to tell what will happen but with only 7 rounds, the tournament will quickly sort itself out.

Malcolm Pyke

Mirko Rujevic

One player has asked for a bye for tomorrow's third round game in the Malitis Memorial. Jack Puccini is currently in China playing for Australia in the World Youth Olympiad, a team tournament for under 16's. Jack is currently playing board 3 for Australia 2 and has scored a magnificent 5/6, his only loss being to 2449 rated Russian FM Kiril Alekseenko. The MCC are also represented in the Australia 1 team with Ari Dale also having a stellar performance scoring 5.5/7 on board 4 although things were even better before the double round yesterday as it was the second game on the day he lost. All the young Australians are working hard to achieve the best results for their teams, and currently, the 1st team are 8th place (=7th) and the 2nd team are in 39th (=30th). There are still 2 rounds to go and both teams will be looking to improve upon their current standings.

In my last post, I complained about the lack of pgn games on the official website. Well, within about 1 hour of writing that post a pgn of rounds 1-6 was posted on the website. I was immediately ready to forgive the organisers, until I opened it and found it contained only the games from the live boards. To be honest, these games should have been posted to the site immediately, and it should have taken some time for other games to be manually loaded into a database. But I am now not going to hold my breath for the remaining games of the event to be published.