Three IM-norms in Hoogeveen
Besides the crown group the Essent Tournament had a very strong open group this year, with about fifteen grandmasters and several international masters at the participants list. This meant a perfect field for scoring norms and three players did take an IM-norm home: Dutchies Alexander van Beek and Ali Bitalzadeh and Moulthun Ly from Australia. (Robert Ris also scored a norm but he had already enough of those.)
From left to right Moulthun, Ali and AlexanderAli played a fantastic tournament and had even scored a GM-norm if he had drawn Mikhail Gurevich with black. That seemed a mission impossible beforehand and perhaps it was, alhough it seemed he got quite far. How Ali reached this high? It was a combination of being tough and being sharp. Against Ikonnikov and Van der Wiel he managed to draw a worse rook ending and against Dambacher and Ibrahimov he simply had a sharper tactical vision.
Ali Bitalzadeh>> replay Ali's gamesAbout fourteen year old Moulthun Ly I wrote before. He came to The Netherlands with his father (a modest man who cultivates fruit at a farm; he emigrated from Cambodia to Australia with his wife about ten years ago) and had a great week with playing some soccer in the morning at the bungalow park, playing blitz at the bungalow at night as a compensation of missed ICC time (although he did play some in the pressroom!) and during the day cruising for his second norm in a most cautious and quiet manner. In the next video his game from the last round, in which he had to beat Freddie van der Elburg (2359) with black and did so. At a certain moment two icons of Australian chess, Ian and Cathy Rogers, are watching and enjoying it.
Moulthun Ly with chief arbiter Koos Stolk>> replay Moulthun's gamesAli and Moulthun atrracted most attention of course; Alexander van Beek scored his norm quite surreptitiously. He had to win in the last round and did it convincingly.
Alexander van Beek with Koos Stolk>> replay Alexander's games
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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