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Gold Coast Open U1600 Day 1

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rlian3
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Hi everyone and welcome to my blog! I will be posting my tournament games with analysis as well as my thoughts during the tournament. I hope you will enjoy!

The Gold Coast Open tournament was held over the weekend from the 25th to 26th of June near the Hinterland Hotel in Nerang.This blog will cover the first day of the tournament in the U1600 division. The time control for this tournament was 60 minutes + 10 seconds per move.

Day 1:

Round 1: 

Game 1 went well although I thought during the game I didn't really feel that great about my position and I felt I had to go for tricks that didn't see to work such as the 16.Rd1 idea. Got a bit too tricky with the c7 pawn sacrifice which almost backfired.

Round 2: 
The pens we were supplied had lids that very loosely fitted on the back of the pens. So when I picked up my pen to write the moves down I inadvertely catapulted my pen lid onto board next to mine during that game. 

Round 3:
So many knight moves and took some time notation which knight went to a particular square as many of black's knight's moves could be made by either knight. I felt my position was going well, but once my attack was apparently stopped, I felt I was going downhill since I was overextended, black had the bishop pair and had to becareful of black's outside passed pawn. 

Round 4:
After the first 3 rounds I was pretty tired at this point. It didn't really help that I couldn't get much of a break between the rounds as my games were one of the few last to finish. So I felt exhausted and wasn't really in the mood to play the game. Maybe I should take a bye next time around.



During the game on the board next to mine, Mark Stokes' clock had 20 something minutes on it then his time went to 0! Good thing that he kept track of the clock times so he got his time back. After winning that game and ending day 1 on 2.5/4, I was feeling pretty good about my play during the tournament so far even though I played lower rated players.

That is it for day 1 of the Gold Coast Open U1600, stay tuned for part 2 of the blog which will cover the 2nd day.
Feel free to leave any comments, questions, corrections or any analysis and thanking for taking the time to read the blog. I hope you enjoyed it and found it interesting.