Friday, November 6, 2009

25th Nottingham Games on 31st October 2009


GiLoCatur just learnt about Nottingham Games organized by Nottingham Malaysian Society. This year event is a jubilee meaning it has been held for 25 years. Basically, the Games is for Malaysian students from universities all over UK. Reading from its official website, there are 13 games contested and chess is one of them. The format for the chess event is five-rounds swiss system. Then the top five will play double round-robin to determine the top five winners.

According to its second runner-up winner, Soti who represented Norwich's University of East Anglia, below are the winners.

1st - University of Bradford
2nd - University of Nottingham (Bala)
3rd - University of East Anglia (Norwich) (Soti)
4th - University of Cambridge
5th - ?

From Soti's blog, he won all his five rounds in the swiss-system format. He even won with 1.5 - 0.5 score againts the eventual winner in the round-robin format.

Based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nottingham_Malaysian_Games, the past winners for Lightning Chess (10-minute blitz) event :

2006 - Imperial College London
2005 - University College London
2004 - University of Southhampton

It is quite common to have Sporting event or Games like this overseas. While GiLoCatur was studying in the states (USA) in late 80's, GiLoCatur also participated in the Malaysian Games held in Austin, Texas. GiLoCatur and University mates were travelling for about 1,000 miles to the games venue which took about 10 hours of driving. We rented cars. Actually, GiLoCatur's university is located in the northern part of texas bordering with New Mexico state. The name of the town is El Paso which is also bordering with Juarez, Mexico. It is easy to visualize about the town just by mentioning High Chaparral. If not mistaken, chess is not one of the games contested. Anyway, GiLoCatur was not active in chess during then eventhough while back in Malaysia while studying in the preparatory college did participate in few chess tournaments. Shah Alam was popular with chess tournaments during that time. GiLoCatur remembered vaguely that once participated in a tournament held underground Dataran Merdeka. Maybe Hairulov can tell and have clear memory about chess tournaments in Klang Valley during the late 80's and early 90's.

Hopefully, Malaysian chess players who are active playing in chess tournaments abroad can share their stories and pictures to enlighten our chess industry. They are very welcome to send their stories and pictures to be entered in this blog.

For more info and stories about Nottingham Games, please surf the following URls :







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