Nice to be back at the chess club, with the Summer Cup starting tonight. I'll update the blog later on with the results, but I thought I should just make a quick note of the successes enjoyed by club members over the summer.
You probably know about these already, but I'll just go over them again quickly.
First of all congratulations to Scott Wastney, the 2017 New Zealand Champion. This is the 3rd time he has won the title, the last time being in 2013, which was also the last time the New Zealand Championship was held in Wellington.
Scott got 7/9, half a point behind the tournament winner Ari Dale (who doesn't get to be New Zealand champion because he's Australian).
In the same tournament, Wellington players Bill Forster and Yogesh Kulkarni jointly picked up the Major Open title with their 5.5 points out of 9.
In the Rapid tournament, Wellington player Anthony Ker became joint NZ Rapid champion along with Hans Gao with their 7/9 scores, once again half a point behind Australian Ari Dale.
The NZ Blitz title was not picked up by a Wellington player, but by Upper Hutt's Jeremy Knowles, who is well-known to many of us at the club - congratulations to him.
On to the Zonal - many congratulations to the high-performing Wellington players there.
Anthony Ker came joint second in the Open with 7/9, half a point behind Australian wunderkind Anton Smirnov.
And Layla Timergazi won the women's title with a round to spare, picking up the WIM title in the process. This is the first time a non-Australian has ever won an Oceania Zonal competition, either Open or Women's, so special congratulations to her.
We are very proud of all our winners!
For my own part, I only managed one game in the Blitz tournament before I had to withdraw with painful kidney stones. I did manage to win this game, though, which probably makes me the only player in all the Congress events with a score of 100%!
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