The clash in the 9th and last round last Monday between the two Fide Masters, Javier Martin Perez and Brian Dew, turned out to provide Brian the score needed to win the Preliminaries – and a result that pushed Javier to 10th place, just 1 place below qualification. But, congratulations Brian! And also to Caissa’s Peter Whalley who kept Brian leashed to a draw in round 1.

Unfortunately in round 9, Peter and Caissa’s Hannah Dale both lost their games against Ian Scott and Sai Wai Lai respectively. However, given the very strong competition this year the score of 4.5 points out of 9 is not bad at all.

Brian’s winning of the Prelims was somewhat partly helped in the last round by the strong performance of Jake Chan who (unexpectedly?) defeated Melvin Yu who had been top of the leader board for weeks. Jake ended very strong on 3rd place: well done.

Somewhat unfortunate to see the 12 year old youth talent Michael Yang dropped below the qualifying 9th place for the first time after several weeks upon his loss against Chak Man Chan (CM) – who instead qualified on 9th place through this result. But Michael has many years ahead, and we can expect it won’t be longer than next year that we will hear from him again in the 2014 prelims!

All scores from all rounds can be found in this cross table.