Father & Daughter Both Happy Doing Their Own Things…

I interrupt the orderly sequence of events to report two pieces of good news…

Item 1: Eileen at Summer School

I dropped Eileen off at Trinity School, Teignmouth, on Saturday afternoon for her two-week English course at the summer school run by International Projects. Five days later and no contact from Eileen. No worries; no news is good news in these cases.

However, a worried mother in Hiroshima did not see it like that, so I emailed the school to find out how she was doing and received this reply straight back from one of the managers…

Eileen is fine! She found many friends already. There is one German girl whose mother is Japanese. Thus, she found quickly many friends. I have asked her already several times, whether she wanted to call you from our phone but she said she did not need to.

Quite right too! That is just how I wanted it to be. I do not even mind if she ends up speaking German better than English… 🙂

Item 2: Mission Accomplished At The British Chess Championships

My personal target going into the Week Two Afternoon Open Championship at the 100th British Chess Championships currently taking place at the Riviera Centre, Torquay, was to achieve one win and one draw out of five games. Today I won my second out of four games.

The rest of this post will only make sense if you know a bit about basic chess ratings:

2600+ = World Championship contenders

2400-2600 = Grandmasters and International Masters

2300-2400 = FIDE Masters

2200-2300 =  FIDE Candidate Masters and National Masters

2000-2200 = Candidate Masters and USA Experts

1800-2000 = Class A

1600-1800 = Class B

1400-1600 = Class C

1200-1400 = Class D

below 1200 = Duffer

  • On Monday I played my first game against a guy with an 1850 rating and lost in a game that went on for a few hours and 40-odd moves.
  • On Tuesday I played against a guy with a 1950 rating and lost in a game of similar length.
  • On Wednesday I played against a guy with a 1250 rating and crushed him. He was black and launched a wild, premature Knight and Bishop attack, just the sort of thing that I used to do!! He resigned when I forked his King and Rook just as we were moving into the endgame. 🙂
  • Today I was up against an 1785 rated player and beat him in about 30 moves. Actually, he made a blunder which allowed me to win a Knight in a tense dynamic struggle on the b and c files as I attacked his central Pawn and Knight formation.

Yesterday’s win was a scalp. Today’s is a trophy. It gives me two points, half a point above my target with one more game to go.

However, I think I will be up against a tougher nut tomorrow as the competition is run on the Swiss System, in which you are matched against a player with a similar result to your own in each round of the competition.

Thus, because I lost the first two games, I ended up playing a weaker player on Wednesday. I won that game and so today’s player was more likely to be a stronger player, and, having beaten him, I expect to be up against even stronger opposition tomorrow.

So far the competition has given me just what I wanted; the chance to play against experienced and highly rated players, while also having a reasonable chance of winning or drawing some of my games as well.

DH