Opens in Canberra, Deizisau and Philly
Whenever there are holidays, there's chess. The Easter weekend is always good for a few strong opens, and in this report we're looking at three of them. Li Chao won the Doeberl Cup in Canberra (Australia), Pablo Lafuente was the strongest at the Neckar Open in Deizisau (Germany) and Gata Kamsky won a lot of money in Philadelphia (USA).Doeberl Cup
The Doeberl Cup was held April 1-5 at the Olympus Room of the Hellenic Club of Canberra, Australia. It was a tought 9-rounder, with on the first four days two games a day and one on the last day, with the following time control: 40 moves in 90 minutes plus 30 minutes + 30 seconds per move from move 1. Besides the Premier tournament there were 7-rounders, an under 1200 section and a blitz tournament.GM Li Chao became the first Chinese winner in the long history of the Doeberl Cup; he was the only one to score 7.5 out of 9. Local hero IM George Xie finished sole second with 7/9 while David Smerdon, who played "home" as he's working for the Australian government these days, finished shared 3rd-6th together with Malaniuk (Russia) and Indians Panchanathan and Roy Chowdhury.
During the tournament retired GM and journalist Ian Rogers gave commentary, which was recorded and posted on YouTube. Here's the playlist; below you'll find some games in the game viewer.[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"209","attributes":{"class":"media-image","typeof":"foaf:Image","height":"375","width":"580","style":""}}]]
Neckar Open
The 14th Neckar Open was held April 1-5 at the Public Hall and the Gymnasium of Deizisau (Stuttgart Region), Germany. Like in Canberra, the players had to play two games a day, but in Deizisau they started with one game on Friday and ended with two on Monday. The rate of play was 2 hours for 40 moves plus half an hour to finish the game, so no increment. The tournament was devided into three rating groups (>1800, <2000 and <1400).Argentinian GM Pablo Lafuente won the tournament on tiebreak after finishing shared first with German player Markus Lammers (who scored an IM-norm) and Dutchman David Miedema (who scored a GM-norm).
Pablo Lafuente | Photo: Georgios Souleidis
Philadelphia Open
The Philadelphia Open was held March 31-April 4 at the Sheraton City Center Hotel in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (USA). As with all American tournaments, the set-up was much more complicated than, well, Doeberl and Deizisau together! The open section was a 9-round Swiss with 40 moves for 2 hours plus an hour to finish the game. So far, so good. But there were many different rating sections: Under 2100, Under 1900, Under 1700, Under 1500, Under 1300 and Under 1000. And then there were the options to play either two days, three, four or five.The big Swiss was won by its top favourite, Gata Kamsky, who had the better tiebreak over GMs Ray Robson, Alex Stripunsky and Sergey Kudrin.
Ray Robson vs Gata Kamsky | Photo: Chris Bird
Game viewer
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Peter Doggers joined a chess club a month before turning 15 and still plays for it. He used to be an active tournament player and holds two IM norms. Peter has a Master of Arts degree in Dutch Language & Literature. He briefly worked at New in Chess, then as a Dutch teacher and then in a project for improving safety and security in Amsterdam schools. Between 2007 and 2013 Peter was running ChessVibes, a major source for chess news and videos acquired by Chess.com in October 2013. As our Director News & Events, Peter writes many of our news reports. In the summer of 2022, The Guardian’s Leonard Barden described him as “widely regarded as the world’s best chess journalist.”
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