Discovery Bay Intermediate
Compared to last week this Thursday evening we had more players, gradually returned from holidays, coming back and join. It was a good time to give James his trophy he earned as number 2 in the Beginners group last season.
The step 2 assignment we started with seemed to work like a good reminder of checkmates, stalemates, double attacks and the practice games that followed between Jay, Franz, Ian, Sophie, James, Saga, Suneh and a handful of guest players and first time visitors showed this group is ready to start competition play in September!
Discovery Bay Beginner
Very glad to see Kaya, Kian, Gauri, Christopher, Roshan, Wo Hang, Alex turning up again on Saturday at 1.30pm and a special welcome to our new members Jaewon, Maximilien, Kevin, and Joshua. These boys on their first appearance were impressive. When the competition starts in September we will definitely see some good play in this group.
Discovery Bay Advanced
We had 8 players in the advanced group and divided into a group A and group B we played a double 10mins blitz mini-tournament.
In group B (Wilson, Bryant, Chor Wei and Max) Bryant had 3 points out of 3 games in the first part and seemed to be cruising towards a win. The second part, against the same players with reversed colors, Wilson managed to beat Bryant and both players ended with 5 out of 6 points and in a 5 mins blitz Wilson emerged as victor when Bryant’s time was up despite a better position on the board. It must be noted that Chor Wei played some very good games and gave a way some winning positions mostly because of the clock – but Chor Wei is on the right track!
In Group A (Koji, Miguel Angel, Gerent and Richard) it was Miguel Angel who had defeated everyone after part 1, followed by Koji with 1.5 points. In part 2, again with reversed colors, it was Richard who crawled back convincingly. Both with 4 points, Richard and Miguel Angel had to play a 5mins blitz in which Miguel Angel got a piece behind early on in the game which was won by Richard through good technique. Koji ended with 3.5 points 3rd and Gerent, truly with bad luck in several games, played much better chess than his 0.5 points would suggest.
Kennedy Town
At the second gathering in Kennedy Town we had 5 new players visiting, all of different abilities and it was a fun afternoon playing some chess, doing puzzles and analyzing games.