The 2022 Ballarat Begonia Open
this is me at the Ballarat begonia open
Hi Guys, as you can see this is my first ever blog post and I will be posting about my experience at my second ever fide rated tournament, the Ballarat Begonia open.
The Ballarat Begonia open falls on the long weekend in Australia and the tournament runs from the 12th of March up until the 14th of March.
So anyway in this article I will be talking about how I went in the tournament, and I might also include one or two of the games I played.
As you can see the Ballarat Begonia Open Chess tournament has been around for a long time since 1953 so it, therefore, is quite a famous Australian Chess event.
This year I was lucky enough to participate in a record-breaking event with around 175 entries in the Tournament. The tournament included lots of strong players a few of them including GM Temur Kuybokarov ranked number 2 in Australia, GM Zong-Yuan Zhao, GM Daniel Fernandez, and GM Darryl Johansen, who has been an Australian Champion many times. There were also a lot of other strong players including another 13 strong titled players.
In the end, I ended up with 4/7 and came 52nd in the event. Based on my fide rating of 1746 which was the 42nd highest rating in the tournament at the start I did a pretty good job as my performance was pretty accurate based on what I placed.
Overall I was pretty proud of my performance and I hope that next year I can play in the tournament again as well as being able to play some more OTB tournaments again this year.
Now I will show you some of my games and I at the end I will post the link to the tournament so if you want to you can have a look at the results and who won.
Below is my game result for each round.
| Round 1. Win as white against Chris Barlow, 1500 rated | |||||
| Round 2. Loss as Black against Ryder Testolin, 2086 rated | |||||
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Round 3. Draw as White against Matthew Southall, 1345 rated |
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| Round 4. Draw as Black against Benjamin Jiang, 1470 rated | |||||
| Round 5. Half Point Bye Round | |||||
| Round 6. Draw as White against Jack Smith, 1501 rated | |||||
| Round 7. Win as Black against Leigh Healy, 1465 rated |
These were my two wins in the tournament below.
That was my final round, a nice game in which his Knight got trapped and from there on he was down material.
So there you have it, that was my tournament and this is my first ever article I hope you enjoyed it.
If you have any questions about the tournament feel free to as me about it in the comments.
https://www.ballaratchess.com/begonia/2022/index.html
That is the tournament link, there you can look at the standing of the tournament and who won the prizes as well as some of the tournament results from previous years.
Anyway Bye!
Make sure you stay tuned for any more articles in the future!
