Glorney Gilbert International 2023
This year the tournament was held in Scotland in a welcome return to over the board competition. As in previous years, we were restricted to the four home nations, which meant a six round all play all competition
The tournament was poorly organised, mainly because no one did anything for nine months. The person in charge suffered a bereavement in the spring, but surely other Chess Scotland officials could have stepped in to help relieve the load. The Scots moved the date of the tournament from the traditional end of July to the middle of August, but did not tell anyone until early June, when many of our parents had booked holidays for mid August and their children were thus not available. I did not receive an official invitataion to the tournament until June 21st! Our worst affected team was the Glorney. When originally seleted, Bence Szakmany was pencilled in for board five. In the event he had to play on board one and bravely consented to so so.
On June 13th the Scots were compelled to move the venue from a hotel in Glasgow to Stirling University. In doing so, they fell on their feet, as the university campus is a very pleasant environment with several food outlets and equipped with a spacious playing hall and team rooms.
We were massively out graded on virtually every board in every match and pedictalbly came fourth in all four competitions. At least, we defaulted only one board and that because of illness. The Robinson team scoreed almost twice as many points as last year and the Stokes team scored the same amount. The Gilbert team beat England B 3-0, but every other match was lost. Our best individual performance was by Ethan Challoner, who scored four and a half points out of six and did not lose a game.
The final positions were as follows:
Glorney Scotland 23, England 19.5, Ireland 14, Wales 3.
Gilbert England A 16.5, Scotland 10, England B 5, Wales 4.5.
Robinson England 22.5, Scotland 21.5, Ireland 16.5, Wales 11.5.
Stokes England 33.5, Scotland 19.5, Ireland 12.5, Wales 6.5
The final scores of our players were:
Glorney B. Szakmany 0.5, J. Chung 1, D. Chung O.5, O. Sapsford 0, M. Davies 1.
Gilbert E. Kong 1.5, K. Bagga 1.5, A. Shahameeran 1.5.
Robinson T.Davies 1, Y. Sharhorodsky 1, E. Challoner 4.5, K. Enoch 1.5, V. Prabhu 1.5, R. Sequeira 2.
Stokes F. Nasir 2.5, K. A. Murthy 3, K. Herath 0, L. Zheng 1, L. Davies 0, A. Sarwar 0.
Report by Ian Eustis
