Lithuanian chess championship. Day 1

Hi, everyone! This is my first blog post here, so don’t judge me for some style or grammatical mistakes. So the reason for my debut is to cover Lithuanian chess championship that is being currently held in Vilnius. Usually, championship’s format is Swiss semifinal with 4-6 players advancing to round-robin final when they are joined by top players and those who are invited by federation. But this year, they decided to skip the final part and to organize 9-round Swiss tournament with winner to be crowned new Lithuanian champion. I support that decision, as it helps me and some other players to have a shot on title ( because it hard to find time for two tournaments for non-professional players, spending two weeks of our precious holidays for chess is too much.

As it is seen from chess-results page, the tournament attracted 87 players, which is quite a big number IMHO. Alongside, the 7-round Women chess championship is also held. Official results are to found at http://www.chess-results.com/tnr262140.aspx?lan=1

The main favorites for title were the defending champ IM Tomas Laurusas and the only participating GM, experienced Vidmantas Malisauskas. Bur of course, there is a bunch of lower-rated up and coming young players that are very dangerous. However, as you can see, Tomas already suffered a shockingly-quick defeat against local FM Dmitrijus Chocenka. The latter is a successful correspondence chess player so you should always expect some dangerous opening tricks from him.

So, the funny part – my own games.

After seeing my first round’s pairing I was thinking that it is some kind of trolling- I should play the same guy I played in the last round of Lithuanian chess league just 5 days ago. That game ended in a draw. So, let’s start