A good start to our ABC event – 30 participants and many fighting games!
By FM Andrey Terekhov and Maxim Terekhov
The CAC 1st ABC Swiss Event tournament gathered 30 players from Singapore. All of them are advanced beginners or casual players, who have not (yet) attained FIDE rating in standard chess. However, the starting lineup sported impressive ratings on Lichess, with the top players sporting 1800-2000 ratings.
After three rounds of struggle, the top three winners emerged with a perfect record – 3 out of 3. They were separated in the final standings only by the Buchholz tie-breaker.
The winner was Maxim Terekhov, whose opponents sported a perfect record, other than losing their games to him (making for a Buchholz coefficient of 6). In the second place was Kayden Lim, whose tie-break was one point lower, and third place was Harryndran Gunendran of Victoria School, whose tiebreak was 3½.
The winner of the tournament is a 12-year old boy who did not play chess for almost a year and returned only thanks to #ChessAgainstCovid initiative, with his first tournament after a long break being last week’s Chess960 tournament.
In this competition, he played two games out of three with Black. However, at this level the color does not matter much (White won 44% of the games, Black 42% and 9% of the games ended in a draw).
In the first game, the winner played the Two Knights Defense and although the game quickly steered far away from the conventional theory, Black still got a strong initiative for the sacrificed pawn. Around move 30 Black won an exchange thanks to a nice combination and eventually managed to convert it into a victory. In the second game, he won with a direct attack on the enemy king and delivered a checkmate when the opponent blundered on move 20. The last round game was a hard-fought battle in the Queen’s Pawn Opening, in which White missed an intermezzo on move 21 that would have allowed him to maintain the material balance. All games by the champion will be analysed by our resident analysts (FIDE rated juniors).
The runner up, Kayden Lim, was quite lucky in this tournament. In the second round, he was a piece down by move 12, but twenty moves later his opponent blundered this piece back and lost. In the final round, Kayden was again in a difficult position, but posed enough problems for his opponent to lose most of his advantage first and blunder a full queen in one move.
The third placer, Harryndran, started the tournament by outplaying his opponent with Black pieces in the symmetrical endgame of Ruy Lopez. In the second round he won with a ferocious attack in Sicilian Defense. In the final game, Harry went for Two Knights Defense with Black, obtained a winning by move 10 and confidently converted it into a full point.
Here are some tactical positions from the event that you might want to try to solve:
