Jim West On Chess: Foxwoods Open Results

Monday, March 24, 2008

Foxwoods Open Results

The Foxwoods Open tournament in Connecticut ended yesterday in a five-way tie for first place at 7 points, with GM Yury Shulman winning the tie-break game of blitz chess against GM Alexander Ivanov. The other players with 7 points were GM Julio Becerra, GM Alexander Shabalov, and IM Robert Hess who earned his first grandmaster norm.

In the under 1500 section, my student Ziping Liu finished with a score of 3-1-3, good enough to tie for eighth place with five other players.

"My study of chess was accompanied by a strong attraction to music, and it was probably thanks to this that from childhood I became accustomed to thinking of chess as an art, and have never regarded it as anything else, for all the science and sport involved in it. And, moreover, an art which in some ways is closer to music than it is customary to think. Perhaps chess and music are drawn together by laws of harmony and beauty which are difficult to formulate and difficult to grasp, or perhaps by something else." - Vasily Smyslov