Fianchetto

Had a lot of fun this week heading down the Championships, which have been played at Glasgow Academy, in Kelvinbridge.

I played the morning lightning tourney, yesterday, on the sensory boards (!) and got 3/6, although narrowly seemed to have missed getting the Grading prize

There are some games of this on the net, but the names are all wrong - I salvaged the 3 games of mine I could find…

Browse them here - I have annotated them a bit too

My congratulations to Evis who *did* get the grading prize (the under 1750! one) in the blitz tourney this morning - excellent stuff from the Maestro

The Championships themselves have seen the 2 players I know well, doing *very* well - Allan Brown stormed to a 3.5 in round 5, and has slightly faltered since, but his performance rating gave evidence of his subtle skills. Allan is a great presence at Phones chess club, where I play, he is always keen to instruct us lesser players and I am happy he has done us all very proud with his participation at the Champs.

Also, my good friend Chris (with Blair in this pic) has done very well, after a great start then disastrous 2nd game (which was live on the internets!).

Good luck to both of them in today’s finale.

Check the Scottish Chess 2008 website - with all games, results and live coverage of top boards.

The tournament is very exciting with Markos (GM) still leading and unbeaten but he can be caught still… the young Uzbek greatly impressed yesterday against Markos - getting a draw in a Sveshnikov Sicilian.

Hi for anyone who has ever been to my website before, it was battez.org but I rather lacksadazeically (sick) omitted to renew the domain before it expired a few days ago, incurring a charge of $100+ or let it slide…so it has slid.

Anyway I wanted to move things to this Fianchetto domain, as that is the name of my musical releases that are forthcoming. It’s a chess term (natch) for a flank strategy - generally meaning a bishop on a long diagonal which seeks to control the centre. Wikiepedia has some contributor banging on about it.

…but only english schools it seems. Still, an interesting scheme to provide chess sets for free to all schools who apply. They look slightly ugly but are intriguingly meant to be near indestructible sets made from some form of durable plastic.

Hi we are having a tournament for he next 4 weeks at our Chess Club - “Phones” in Glasgow’s Polish club at the Park.

I have set up a website for the tournament using a free wiki

 I took a few nerdy pics of my chess set that I totally love. It has sentimental and aesthetic value, but doesn’t seem to help my playing level that much :/

Cool, but messy blitz game: