Reigning champion Ben returned to take maximum points in round 3 of the Blitz Grand Prix – though he didn’t win the event on the night…
Our strongest tournament of the season was boosted by the unexpected arrival of Jonathan O’Connor, on his way to a simul in Dublin when he heard the power was out and the simul was off. As he was passing by us when he heard the news, he said he’d drop in to see if there was a game to be had, and found six instead.
The first round was a whitewash for the seeds, helped by a big divide between eighth seed (Ciarán) and ninth (Artem). Things started getting interesting in round 2, where I inflicted Mateo’s first-ever defeat in the competition (he had won with 6/6 on his only other appearance last year) after a fairly wild rook ending in a time scramble. I was made to pay for that in the next round though, when in a winning ending against Ben, I took a couple of seconds too long to work out how to win and my flag fell.
I recovered to scam Eóin with a lovely – if completely fortunate – mate with two pawns against queen, and then lost to Jonathan in an opening which he said he had studied extensively and which had helped him not just to his Correspondence Chess IM title, but also to two IM wins in the ECC, one of which was described by a passing super GM as pretty much perfect play… What wasn’t pretty much perfect play was my final round against Ciarán, when I took a pawn only to notice, as I played the move, that it allowed a bishop check winning my queen. Knowing it’s blitz and anything can happen, I decided to play on for a few moves, and Ciarán kindly hung his own queen the very next move. He still had an edge though, and after I hung a piece a while later, I figured there was definitely no way lightning was going to strike twice and resigned.
Mateo did stop Jonathan taking a 100% record in the final round, while there was a rumour Artem delivered the upset of the evening in beating Zdravko, though my games were mostly last to finish so I didn’t really see what was going on elsewhere!
The final standings were –
And after three rounds, Wenle still leads, and has technically extended his lead at the top to eight points.
We’ll aim for round 4 on the first night back – the ratings for the grading bands will be frozen then – and then hopefully we can finish it off this side of Christmas, while also getting the Frank Scott Shield played of course.