Chess In The Solomons

Australia helps to kick off the Solomon Islands' First International Chess Tournament.

The Australian Newspaper

The last few weeks, I've been pleasantly surprised by the Australian newspaper. It is now carrying a section on Chess once every week in its Mind Games section.

The Chess section is taken from The UK Times newspaper and written by Raymond Keene (hehe, you can seem doing the crosswords in red ink on the right). :)



The last few weeks have been about Robert Fischer. This week's game's analysis centered around the game between Leonid Stein and Bobby Fischer in their Swiss Interzonal of 1967.


The analysis is unfortunately not too in-depth as can be seen from the image above and has been very much condensed. However, in a chess-starved country like Australia, I applaud the Australian for bringing chess back into the news. I've blacked out some of the remaining moves so that if you want to know what they are, I advise that you get a copy of the Australian! ;-)

Daylight Savings

Australia (well, most states anyway) has officially switched over to daylight savings, turning the clock forward by an hour.

This has the most unfortunate side effect of my working hours changing from 8.30am-5.30pm to 10am-7pm. I am not playing in any competitions so the time shifts doesn't have too much of an effect on me. I used to rush like mad from office to the tournament hall because the games typically start at 7.30pm.

The good part is that I now have more time in the morning before I start work. I usually head down to the gym around 7.30am and spent at least 45 min there before showering and heading back to the office to begin my day. But now I have an extra 1.5 hours to kill time.

I'm planning on spending some of this time and relaxing/listening to chess lectures on my iPod or solving chess/crossword puzzles.

My brother-in-law Steven is doing very well at the Ford Memorial tournament, having started off with 4 wins out of 4.

Fellow blogger Weng from the Ryde-Eastwood club was away in Europe and I hope to catch up with him on his travels when next we meet.

Having been away from chess for so long, I realised I've got a huge backlog of chess stuff to go through. Dearie me! :)

The End Is Nigh!

A dense dust storm descended on Sydney overnight and it turned everything blood red. This photo is taken without any filters.

The end of the world is coming! :)

More photos on the "Apocalypse" can be found at the news.com.au website.

It's a bit eerie to wake up and find everything in blood red. I'm half-expecting the Martians to land and Tom Cruise to save us any moment now....

Back From Self Imposed Exile

As some of you might have surmised, I've unfortunately been packed loaded with office work and this has unfortunately led me away from chess for the time being and not being able to update this blog as much as I would like to.

My boss was less than happy with my "chess addiction" (despite it never having impacted my work in any way and I've never done any chess related stuff the past year during office hours unless I was on my lunch hour) and he wanted me to put a stop to it - which I did.

This unfortunately led to a total disillusionment of chess amongst other things. So during that period, I moved away from chess and instead took up computer gaming instead.

The past 2 months, I've been gaming with Command And Conquer, Freelancer and Mechwarrior. I don't deny it but it was fun, heaps of fun. The joys of gaming I guess, never really went away.

I had not touched chess for 2 months but this morning, I woke up at around 5am and logged onto FICS and promptly won all 3 games in succession. I guess in a way, I have not lost my edge although my opening repertoire will need a refresher course.