Victorian Championship Round 3

After 3 rounds of the 2018 Victorian Championship there is only 1 player on a prefect score, FM Luis Chan. Luis beat me from a level position when I overestimated my chances and pushed from a position that really didn't warrant it. It was a very cool performance from the junior player.

Half a point behind the leader are FM Domagoj Dragicevic and John Nemeth, 2 players who have both shown good form this year. They both won as Black yesterday so will go in to the 4th round expecting White. I'm on 2/3 along with a group of players. FM Greg Canfell beat Christopher Lim. I didn't see too much of this game. Thomas Feng played his first game of the tournament and beat FM Eddy Levi, Milenko Lojanica mixed it up against the solid Himath Dissanayake with a kind of Hennig Shara Gambit. Bill Jiang grabbed material against James Watson and hung on to it, and Marcus Raine finished the longest game of the day victorious against a tough to beat Sarah Anton.

It is still early days and anyone can still win this event. It is good to see everyone off the mark as the bottom board game between Regan Crowley and Richard Voon ended in a draw. However, one thing that Chess Victoria will have to look at is the bye situation and forfeits. I guess in amateur chess we are always going to have real life issues that get int he way of our chess, but this tournament has only had 3 rounds and in that time there have been 10 half point byes, 1 zero point bye, 1 full point bye, and 2 forfeits, To put it another way, we have 28 out of a possible 36 games played so far or nearly a quarter of the games haven't been played. Is this really good enough?

The good news is that the tournament will continue as a one game per week event, after the 3 week break we just had. This certainly broke the momentum of the tournament and is something else that could be looked at for next year.

So here is a position that happened in my game against Luis. We had both aimed for this position from a few moves back. The question that needs to be answered is whether White's d-pawn is strong or weak. The answer is probably neither, with the position sitting on a knife edge. Whatever the assessment, Luis played the position from here better than me and won the game convincingly from this position to take the lead in the tournament.