In Pursuit of Wisdom

Last weekend I played US National G/60 and G/30 championship at October 1st and 2nd respectively at Santa Clara Hyatt hotel. Bay Area Chess arranged these as usual in different sections. I made 50% scores in both of those at 1800+ (Open) section to my relief. My last month's tournament performance was disappointing (1 win and 3 loss) while this time in G/60 it was 2 loss, 2 win and in G/30 it was 2 loss, 1 draw and 2 win. With this performance now I am a bit relaxed and I think I can still carry on playing competitive tournaments for a few more years even if I don't hit the prize lists. Here is my G/60 result - https://bayareachess.com/events/11/usg60.php And here is my G/30 result - https://bayareachess.com/events/11/usg30.php With this, now I am inspired enough to teach chess to my son and other children from next week.

Last weekend I was quite busy with the 37th People's Chess Tournament in Fremont Marriott. As it was a long weekend, I registered it online through www.bayareachess.com after renewing my US Chess Membership. After a successful World Cup Cricket 2011 opening ceremony in Dhaka where Bryan Adams, Shankar-Ehsan-Loy, Runa Laila, Sabina Yasmin et al perfomred in the midst of mind blowing fireworks, we gathered in Shahriar's house for the India vs Bangladesh opening match of the world cup in 19th February. He arranged lots of people and we had a nice time gossiping together (Ezaz, Amin, Dhanad, Sayeem, Wali Bhai, Sumit Bhai, Mamun Bhai, Dipu Bhai and some others). Although we lost due to a huge score from Sehwag (175) that took India's total to 370/4 in 50 overs, we gave it a fight by scoring 283/9 without being all out. That meant I didn't get much sleep for the next morning's chess game in the tournament at 11:30 AM.  I won the first game nicely, drew a lost game agai...

I won the round 2 of chess tournament in Salesforce.com a little earlier playing with black. My opponent was Ron Pragides who sits in seventh floor in the same building as mine. He is Senior Director of Software Engineering. Shishir and Maithili joined me to watch the game. The chess clock we had actually ran out of battery so Ron did an interesting thing. He downloaded a chess clock in his iPhone where we set 20 minutes for each of us. It served the purpose fine! Ron made the first mistake but I made a follow up mistake too to bring him back in the game. So it went down to Ron to make the final mistake by him through which I was able to mate him. Unlike round 1, this time I was ahead of time.