Caissa Hong Kong Chess Club

chess in hong kong

A Weekend of 10 minutes Blitz

October 28th, 2013

Discovery Bay

The weather last Saturday was so good that, well, why not enjoy the breeze of a blitz. The beginners group was divided into two groups of 5 players.

In group B, Kaya and Gauri shared first place with 2.5 points, followed by Chris with 1.5, Tiffany with 1 and Fiona with 0.5 points. In group A, Alex who came late and played a game less, still ended first with 3 straight wins, followed by Maximilien with 2.5, Wo Hang with 2, Jaewon with 1 and Kevin this time with no points.

Coach Aravind watches over group A. Group B is in the foreground.

Coach Aravind watches over group A. Group B (Fiona-Tiffany and Gauri-Chris) play in the foreground.

In the Advanced group we missed Koji and Richard this time as Richard played in the Hong Kong Chess Association organized October 2013 tournament for youth. Richard was the only player from Caissa but he made an impact by winning the U12 category with 5 out of 8 points. Congrats Richie!

Aravind, who helped supervise the Beginners group stayed on to play in the Advanced mini Blitz tournament – the weather was still very good…

Also in the Advanced group we split in 2 groups. In group B Mei Jing kept on showing her form but Max this time seemed to have a strong come back; to that degree that Max and Mei Jing, both ending with 3 points, had to play a 5 minutes deciding game. Mei Jing had the better position and two more minutes on the clock when the clock’s battery’s turned dead. We had to leave the place and the game was decided draw. Samira ended with 2 points, Chor Wei with 1.5 and Wilson with 0.5.

In group A, David only lost to Miguel Angel but ended first place with 3 points, followed by Miguel Angel with 2.5, Aravind with 2, James with 1.5 and Miguel Angel sr., with 1 point.

Left: James – Aravind and Chor Wei – Samira while Miguel Angel sr. watches Mei Jing play

Sheung Wan

In Sheung Wan we are glad to welcome Matthew and Marcus as our new members and it was also good to have both Melvin and Oliver visiting for a trial as they showed some good play, 10 minutes blitz – the weather was still very good – against Miguel Angel, Mei Jing and Ritvik.

10 minutes blitz thaThe weather was still great

Rafe scores important win in Intermediate and Mei Jing leads Advanced Group

October 22nd, 2013

Discovery Bay Beginners

Last Saturday in the Beginners group we played a round robin of 5 rounds.

In Group A we saw a very tight race for glory in which Alex emerged as the number 1. Kian and Jaewon had some games in which their positions were very much winning but the solution could not be found over the board.

In Group B some players had to leave a little earlier, thus losing a critical match. In this scramble of unevenly played matches Fiona turned out to be the winner together with Kaya.

Discovery Bay Intermediate

Rafe scored an important win against Ian and now ranks 1st place with Ian both with 5 points but Rafe has played one game less. With several games still to play it is not clear how this group ends although Rafe seems the favorite at this moment.

Intermediate Group Ranking after 7 Rounds

Discovery Bay Advanced

In the Advanced group we welcome two new members. New adult player James brings in some solid quality which he displayed by beating Richard in round 2.

New girl youth player Samira also showed she had no starting problems by winning her first game in this group against Max who in round 1 had miraculously escaped into a stalemate against Chor Wei.

Chor Wei in this round moved convincingly towards a better position against Mei Jing but in the King Pawn against King Pawn ending Mei Jing’s calculations turned out to be more precise and once her pawn queened the finish was merely a technical exercise.

Miguel Angel hasn’t found his form yet in this group and lost against Koji who seems to improve week after week.

Advanced Group Ranking after Round 2

Sheung Wan

Our Sheung Wan location was opened last Sunday and it is ready to go. It was good to see some new people visit the place and we hope to see our Kennedy Town participants, and more new members, find their way to this location soon!

Caissa Hong Kong Chess Club – Sheung Wan

Caissa Club Competition takes off

September 9th, 2013

Discovery Bay Beginners

With well over 20 players showing up last Saturday, the Beginners group was too crowded for the venue. Of course that is good news (!) and we will be talking with BMSE to see if we can get a larger venue in the building.

Coach Andrew joined for the first time and supervised the group A players who played their first round:

Julian – Alex: 0-1
Joshua – Kevin: 1-0
Kian – Max: 0-1
Roshan – Wo Hang: 0-1

In group B, with lots of new players with whom the rules were reviewed, two games were played by the somewhat more experienced players:

Gauri – Aleesha: 1-0
Kaya – Harrison: 0.5-0.5

Ranking after Round 1

Discovery Bay Intermediate

The Intermediate group had started Thursday already. We see strong results from the “veterans” in this group whereas the newly promoted or newly joined players, Saga and James are still adjusting.

Sophie – Saga: 1-0
Raphael – Suneh: 1-0
Jay – James: 1-0

Ranking after Round 1

Discovery Bay Advanced

The Advanced group is also divided in a Group A and B and in the B group we had two spectacular results.

Chor Wei with a queen, 2 rooks and an army of pawns up, let Maxwell walk into a stalemate position on the outskirts of the board and Bryant with queen and rook allowed Mei Jing’s lonely king in the middle of the board to run into stalemate …

Bryant – Mei Jing: 0.5-0.5
Maxwell – Chor Wei: 0.5-0.5

Amazing if not heroic stalemate: Maxwell needs a rest …

Bryant wisely ignores Mei Jing’s “relief” …

In group A Richard with white played against Miguel Angel and benefited well from his early built up space advantage. Miguel Angel could not repair the damage that came from opening up the position for his counter attack deep in white’s territory. In the other game, Andrew with black defeated Koji.

Koji – Andrew: 0-1
Richard – Miguel Angel: 1-0

Ranking after Round 1

Kennedy Town

There was no meeting in Kennedy Town because all venues in the community center had been reserved for that day.

Hong Kong Open Chess 2013 Round 1

September 3rd, 2013

A good warming up for the Hong Kong International Open Chess Championship 2013 from 26 September until 1 October is the Hong Kong Open 2013 Championship which runs throughout September and October.

Yesterday’s round 1 saw some interesting results. Hong Kong 2013 Champion FM Luen-Wah Luk had to accept a loss against Ritesh Mahajan. Jake Chan, in good form in previous tournaments, found his opponent Kuen Yui Pang with black breaking through just a bit faster on the queenside in a typical Sicilian play where white attacks black’s king side and black goes for the queen side attack.

Youngster Ronald Choy won calmly against veteran Pak Tuen Cheung and other youth player Benjamin Oh drew convincingly against Caissa’s David Garceran Nieuwenburg. Caissa’s Peter Whalley, after a hiatus of several months, started off rusty with a loss against Wai Kit Lin in what seemed an equal game for a long time.

Let’s see what next week will bring.

Ranking after round 1 and pairing round 2 Hong Kong Open 2013

Olympiad U16 Tough for Hong Kong team

July 30th, 2013

The Olympiad U16 (21-30 July) in Chongqing, Mainland China, is a mixture of some 30 official country teams of 4 players and at least as many local chess clubs. Great to see so many chess clubs interested in participating and it surely hints towards China being serious about developing international chess. On the other hand, that many clubs mixed with national teams moves the event somewhat away from a true inter-land competition.

The organization though, keeps track of the country teams in a separate list and our Hong Kong delegation after round 10 ranks 30st out of 32 official country teams.

No doubt our players Luke, Michael, Saloni, Ryan and Pak Shing gave it their all and the experience to participate in a world championship event is to be cherished for the rest of their lives.

Board Results after Round 10 World Youth Chess Olympics U16 2013

Board Results after Round 10 World Youth Chess Olympiad U16 2013

To participate on a World Champion level tournament, of course, is something to be nervous about and definitely our players would be more comfortable a next time, having gained this valuable experience now – especially so for some of our players who participated while being several years below 16 years of age.

To better support our players in the future it could help if the HKCF would invite players, based on their performance e.g., in qualifying tournaments (like how HKCF does with the Olympiad for adults), to defend Hong Kong in official tournaments. Upon accepting the invitation, players would be formally trained and prepped, say, for at least 3 months before the event.

Such an arrangement requires some funding or sponsorship. Caissa would volunteer to organize sponsorship for such a set-up (of transparant qualification and selection), which would include travel/lodging of the selected players to international events (not only players would go who can afford to bear the travel costs) and training.

This has been suggested to HKCF and awaiting a response.

Discovery Bay Getting ready for the Hong Kong Inter-School Chess Championship

January 23rd, 2013

Being the local chess club, Caissa obviously has quite a lot of players who go to one of the two Discovery Bay international schools, Discovery College or Discovery Bay International School.

Like last year with this tournament, as well as with with the ESF Quarry Bay School organized Primary Championship, Caissa will be facilitating some training for the Discovery College players in the coming weeks.

Last year Discovery College participated just with 1 team and it was a tough ride, but with 3 wins, 1 draw and 3 losses, the team ended decently on 32nd place in this strong tournament.

This year we have already 16 players registered to participate and Discovery College is about to arrive with 4 teams in the Primary section!

Of course we also hope DBIS will be assembling a team – from Caissa we wish them just as much success.

In any case, for the fledgling Discovery Bay chess community we already have something achieved by coming in with 4, 5 or hopefully 6 times as many students than came in from Discovery Bay last year. That prize is already ours …

CHRISTMAS BREAK

December 13th, 2012

On 20 & 27 December the club will be closed.

We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Round 3 Youth Competition 2012-13

October 19th, 2012

On 18 October we played the 3rd round of our youth competition. Jay played with white against Lucas. Their game became the longest game of the evening with the victory eventually going to Jay.

Connor had a tough night against Ruaidhri and had to give in after the middle game. Mei Jing, in a rather equal position, lost on time against Chor Wei and Mees could not stop Miguel-Angel’s attack. Franz stayed very focused and Julien could not escape his grip.

Max played very well against our new member Sophie to claim the full point through a ‘chain checkmate’, but Sophie’s play showed clear hints of this young lady’s capabilities to fast track on the learning curve of positional chess.

Ask Naper played solidly and patiently against another new member, Mikael. Despite Mikael’s loss, he proved to be a fearless fighter and with some patience his play could develop into an attractive attacking style.

Aiden against Kaiden, again two new members, played an interesting game in which Kaiden attacked to such a degree that Aiden’s position was broken, but there was not enough material anymore to take advantage of that and Aiden cleverly turned the game into a win using the extra material Kaiden had sacrificed for his ferocious attack.

The rank after 3 rounds:

Rank after Round Three Youth 2012-13 Caissa Hong Kong Chess Club

Hong Kong Open Chess 2012 Round 5

October 16th, 2012

In what could have been an interesting night with the top 8 players facing one another, the sudden absence of Billy Lo and Seth Levine, and consequently the respective “wins” for Aravind Mahadevan and Alberto Muniz, who came for nothing, was disappointing. It is not good for the Hong Kong chess scene, fragile in various ways, that such things happen rather frequently.

Numbers 1 and 2, Caissa’s David Garceran Nieuwenburg and Chun Keung Yeung did show up. Although C.K., with white, tried to simplify the position by trading most of the pieces, his two knights that remained on the board were too weak to defend a weakened queen side pawn formation and to handle David’s bishop and knight heading towards that direction to reap havoc there.

Number 3, Luen-Wah Luk (FM) played against the just-turned 12 year old number 5, Michael Yang. Luen-Wah found a way to penetrate the white fortress along the h-file and Michael could not hold the position when both black rooks and the black queen were moving about the second and third ranks.

Michael Yang (left) setting up the pieces with Luen-Wah after a tough fight

Ian Scott, with white, faced Caissa’s Peter Walley’s Scandinavian and although Peter damaged the white position considerably in the middle game, Ian somehow managed to maneuver his heavy artillery onto the black’s king side with a winning attack.

Finally, in the top half of the ranking, Sydney Lai started a wild looking offensive that overwhelmed Jake Chan’s black pieces and puts Sydney back in the top 4.

Next week we’ll see David and Alberto play for the first spot with still good chances for all players in the the top 9 to stay in the race.

Rank after 5 rounds and pairing for round 6 in Hong Kong Chess Open 2012

England Zhou Yang-Fan (IM) Wins Hong Kong International Open Chess 2012

October 3rd, 2012

The Hong Kong International Open (28 September – 3 October) attracted about double the players compared to the 2011 edition, including some players at various master levels: GM, IM and CM.

Some 25 players came from abroad and if this trend continues we hopefully see an even stronger field in coming years, which a city like Hong Kong deserves and is able to pull off with a modern and very capable organization like the HKCF.

Whereas other FIDE rated tournaments often spread out 9 rounds over 9-10 days, the demanding schedule here, organized around a consecutive few national holidays, saw players pull off two games on a single day (from 9am-2pm and 3pm-8pm), doing 9 rounds in just 4.5 days.

FIDE Arbiter Luk Luen-Wah speaks with the Hong Kong Participants Robin Lai (front) and Cyrus Lai while PT Cheung (foreground standing) listens in.

Participants from Discovery Bay were Peter Whalley and David Garceran Nieuwenburg (both Caissa) as well as Jean-Sebastian Brett. David had recently played an international tournament but for Peter and Jean-Sebastian it was their first such tournament and the warming up for the ones to come!

Peter Whalley (sitting left) analyzes his game against Alberto Muniz while Hong Kong Champion HK Tsang (left standing) and Chak Man Chan observe.

After 9 rounds David had scored 5 points, Peter 4 points and Jean-Sebastian 3.5 points. Definitely we will be practicing more in Discovery Bay in the coming year and gradually work ourselves up the rankings of coming tournaments.

Below the final ranking after 9 rounds with a special congratulations to both Robin Lai and Alberto Muniz who manged to end in the top 10.

HK International Open Chess 2012 End results (1)

HK International Open Chess 2012 End results (2)