2 More W's

I won both my games today. :-) So I'm at 4-1-1 after 6 rounds. There are still 3 more rounds. But I'm guaranteed now to at least break even for the tournament. (i.e. finish at .500 or above). The standings are here.

No! Don't Move There!

I managed to get myself into a slightly inferior position in my first game today, which deteriorated into a losing endgame. By some miracle, however, I managed to salvage a draw. For my second game today, I got into horrible time trouble yet again. (Recall that if you run out of time then you lose). I made my first significant screw up of the tournament and lost a piece as I didn't enough time left to properly think about my move. The position was total chaos, but I think if I played properly then I would have ended up with the better position. Oh well, such is life. So I'm sitting at 2-1-1 and currently tied for 6th of 22 in the U2000 section. (There are five sections, U2000 being the middle one). Perhaps tomorrow will bring better luck.

A Good Start

Not very many people showed up Wednesday night for the blitz tournament. (For the uninitiated, that means you get 5 minutes to make all your moves. If you run out of time you lose). Barely more than 10% of those playing in the tournament proper played. I went 6-7-1 to finished tied 9th-13th of 18 players. Needless to say, the Grandmaster won.

Today was a little more successfully. I won both my games. I'm tired beyond belief now. I need to search the Internet to see if I can find cheaper parking at the University of Guelph, have a snack, prepare for tomorrow's first game and then get some sleep...

8 Days Of Chess

Yesterday was the first day of my eight days of chess. It was the third round of the summer round robin at the local club. I won. :-) But I seem to have reverted back to my old habits. I almost ran out of time. Today the Guelph Pro-Am International starts. While, there is just the "opening ceremonies" (whatever that entails) and then a blitz tournament. It starts for real tomorrow and run through to Monday. (Nine rounds in total). Then next Tuesday will be the fourth round of the tournament at the local club. I think I'll be really tired by then. I think I found the website for the Guelph tournament. Perhaps there will be updates during the tournament. (For reference, I'll be playing in the Under 2000 section).

More Photos

I put up photos from my convocation as well as my camping trip. So that brings my photo gallery "up to date".

Round 2

Last night was the second round of the chess tournament that I'm in at the local chess club. Somehow I misplayed the opening and ended up at a slight disadvantage. There wasn't too much choice on what to do after that - I managed to force trading off lots of pieces to (more or less) equalize. The result was a fairly unclear endgame. I accepted a draw offer at that point as it seemed like a decent result. (Although, it probably would have been a good experience to play out the game and see what would happen).

I've finished posting all my photos from my trip to Europe. (While, technically that's not all the photos I took, but it's all the photos that I'm going to post here).