Tuesday 30 September 2008

ACT Junior Championships

The ACT Junior Chess Championships is underway at the ACT Junior Chess League headquarters at Campbell High. A large field of 60 players has entered this 3 day, 9 round event. As with a lot of junior events, the age of the field is weighted towards the younger end, with the older juniors often not playing due to concerns about school, their social lives, or even the strength of the tournament.
In an effort to address this, ACTJCL President Charles Bishop organised an extra event for the middle day of the Championship. He invited 4 of the strongest ACT Juniors for a Round Robin event, intended both to get them together and playing, but also to show the the younger ACT Juniors chess at the "top of the ladder". I snuck over at lunchtime to have a look and was fortunate to catch the end of a couple of very exciting games. Charles had obviously chosen the field well, as at the end of the 2nd round each of the players (Michael Wei, Junta Ikeda, Andrew Brown, and Yi Yuan) had each score 1 win and 1 loss each. In the third round Michael Wei defeated Andrew Brown and Yi Yuan beat Junta Ikeda, leaving Michael Wei the winner on tie-break by virtue of defeating Yi Yuan in the following game.




1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Was a great tournament. Yi and Junta finished around 6:10 pm. Should have gone to collect my wife from work around 5:00 pm but the game simply took priority.

As for the finish of the ACT Junior Championships itself, I was about to hand the hat around to collect a few hundred $$ to slip to Joshua Bishop to ensure that he threw the game and allowed Justin Chow to win so that we could all go home, else a playoff would have ensued.

As it was Justin prevailed despite the valiant fighting efforts of Joshua and that, being the final game, ended at around 6:15 pm.

Justin on 7.5/9 was the overall champion with Emma Guo (7.5/9 but who had lost to Justin) the Girls Champion and Alan Setiabudi the Runner up (7.5/9)

One of the best contests I saw was between Josh Walker and Megan Setiabudi. Megan was hovering around under 5 minutes and Josh at 9 minutes. Megan was sitting on 16 seconds, Josh on 13 seconds. Josh's move, after a thinking he made his move but by then he was down to 3 seconds. Between moving and pressing his clock, his time had elapsed and he lost on time.

How they sustain their composure under such pressure I do not know.