School Chess results

WP teams won all their Sections.

Girls' Sections:

U13:  Masipumelele, Khayelitsha

U15:  Steenberg

U18:  Pinelands

Open Sections:

U9:    Curro

U11;  Curro

U13:  Curro

U15:  Curro

U18:  Settlers for the 7th consecutive year!

Thanks to Marcelle Agulhas for the information.

Puzzle 2

Here is a very useful tactic that appears at all levels of chess.
Answer is in white below, select text to see answer
(24. Rd7 Qc6 25. Rd8+ and Black resigns)
 I got this puzzle from this excellent article on Chess.com.

The passing of Mr Xzonophone Pitt on Thursday 7 August 2014

Mr. Pitt’s funeral on Saturday the 16 August.

• At home ( 33 Geland St, Grassy Park) – 8AM
• At Church (Methodist Church, 2nd Ave, Grassy Park) – 9AM

Gata Kamsky vs. Henry Steel at the 2014 Chess Olympiad

This game is between Gata Kamsky and one of South Africa's best players, Henry Steel.  Henry Steel shows amazing skill to defeat the super grand master.

I do not understand this game well enough to analyse it correctly (even with the help of Stockfish), so please add any insights into this game in the comments.  This game comes from the 2014 Chess Olympiad held in Norway, all the games from the Olympiad can be downloaded from: https://chess24.com/en/olympiad2014/games/pgn).

Kenny Solomon vs Fabiano Caruana at the 2014 Chess Olympiad

The 2014 Chess Olympiad is under way in Norway and South Africa has sent two teams. The South African Men's team competed against the Italian Team on the 3rd of August. On board number 1 Kenny Solomon played Fabiano Caruana. During the opening Kenny Solomon sacrifices a pawn for position, this against the 3rd highest ranked Chess player in the world. The game is even into the endgame where Kenny makes a subtle mistake and Fabiano wins. Well played!


For more information about the South African Chess team please goto http://www.chessa.co.za

Curro Durbanville Chess Festival

The dates of the tournament was the 25th and the 26th of July 2014.  The club members with myself included had to met at Grassy Park Library at 15:30 to arrive in Durbanville before 17:00. We all climbed into the car and we were off to Curro School, where the tournament would be taking place.  The club members were unusually quiet, all of them probably were nervous as well.  Halfway there, we got stuck in traffic.  This nearly caused us to be late, but we made it in time for round 1.

We arrived at the venue to find quite a number of people there.  The tournament consisted of the Elite, A and B as well as the Beginners Sections.  The Friday consisted of two rounds.  The first two rounds went quick and we left the school at round about 21:30.

The Tournament continued the next day.  The last three rounds were to be played.  The first round of the day which started at 10:00 went even better than the previous rounds.  We then had a break from 12:00 to 13:00. The group members came together and used the opportunity to analyse the games that were played.  The break ended and we played the last two rounds which went okay.  We then packed up and got ready for prize giving.

At prize giving there was quite a few children that got prizes.  After prize giving we left at about 19:00, feeling exhausted but also very proud  of ourselves, even though everyone didn't get prizes  It has been a wonderful experience and we all look forward to playing in the School's tournament this weekend...

Written by Gaylon Frans

The results:
   Elite Section
   A Section
   B Section
   U/10 Section
   Beginner Section

These results were obtained from on the Curro Chess website.

South Africa chess opening fashion

Different chess openings are popular at different times.  For example the King's Gambit was the most popular chess opening for 300 years (wiki) but is hardly ever played in competitions these days.  Below is a very basic openings analysis of the South African chess games played since 2009:

Openings, based on 1 ply			Openings, based on 2 ply
Name	Played	%	Name	Played	%
Reti	32	7
English opening	43	10
Queen's pawn	165	37
			Queen pawn (1. d4 Nf6)	101	61
			Queen's pawn game (1. d4 d5)	56	34
			Dutch	8	5
King's Pawn	208	46
			Scandinavian (centre counter)	5	2
			Alekhine's defence	6	3
			Robatsch	5	2
			Pric defence	6	3
			Caro-Kann	13	6
			Sicilian defence	95	46
			French defence	31	15
			King's pawn game (1.e4 e5)	47	23

The analysis is based on information extracted from games on www.chesstempo.com, that where held in South Africa and the players had ratings between 1600 and 2500, and the games occured since 2009.  Note that the Commonwealth chess games were excluded from this analysis.  450 games were found on chesstempo that fitted these citeria.

The analysis is divided into opening defined by only one ply (a single move) and openings defined by 2 plies.  The percentage for the single ply openings is the number of times this opening was played divided by the total number of games.  The percentange of the openings defined by two plies is the number of times this opening was played divided by the number of times first ply associated with this opening was played (i.e. for the Sicilian opening the percentage is calculated as the number of games in which 1. e4 c5 was played divided by the number of games that had 1. e4.

Due to the small number of games it was difficult to extract further meaningful results, if you would like to examine the data please send me an email and I can supply you with the Excel sheets used.

Of the 450 games the King's Gambit was played twice.