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Oceania Zonal 2009
Posted June 22nd, 2009 by Robert Jamieson

22nd June, 2009 Oceania Zonal

This week is an exciting week for Australian chess as Australia is hosting the Oceania Zonal Tournament at Tweed Heads on the Gold Coast.

Ninety-one players from our region are competing in the Zonal and the Women’s Zonal with the winners earning the right to play in the World Cup later in the year.

As an additional attraction the world number 6 player, Levon Aronian from Armenia, is attending the tournament to support his girlfriend, Australia’s no.2 lady Arianne Caoli.

It’s easy these days for chess enthusiasts to follow the progress of the event as

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Hanks for the Memories
Posted June 15th, 2009 by Robert Jamieson

A couple of days a ago I received a phone call from an excited friend. The conversation went as follows:

Friend: “Robert, you’ll never guess what has happened!”
Robert: “What?”
Friend: “You have a game published in today’s Saturday Age Chess Column.”
Robert: “Impossible! I haven’t played a tournament game for 15 years and I haven’t died so why would they publish one of my games?”
Friend: “You may not have died but John Hanks has - aged 83 years he passed away a couple of weeks ago.”
Robert: “Oh No!

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Time Management
Posted June 1st, 2009 by Robert Jamieson

I attended the RJ Shield Tournament at Doncaster Gardens Primary School last Sunday and had the opportunity to watch about 40 young players compete over 7 rounds in 15 minute games.

It’s a pity that these days players don’t have an opportunity to play in more events that require them to use a clock and consequently learn how to manage their time.

You will generally find that there are four categories of chess players when it comes to using chess clocks.

Category A players are inexperienced and do not know what to think about so they see a move they like and just play it quickly.

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The Softer Benefits of Chess
Posted May 29th, 2009 by David Cordover

In a May survey of over 200 Australian schools, 98 percent said that chess has many ‘soft’ skill benefits in addition to the commonly discussed ‘hard’ benefits like problem solving, mathematical reasoning and spatial awareness, with 61 percent stating that chess had an equal effect on both soft and hard skills. View the survey results .

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Chess vs Poker
Posted May 25th, 2009 by Robert Jamieson

There’s quite a debate raging on the internet about the relative merits of chess and poker.

I’ve never played competitive poker although some chess players, such as Eddie Levi and Guy West, are excellent card players. The closest I’ve come is when a spectator commented to me that I had a “poker face” as he could never tell if I was winning or losing my chess game by looking at my expression. Apart from that, there are some similarities between chess and poker.

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Guru in Action
Posted May 18th, 2009 by Robert Jamieson

Skill at chess requires an ability by the good player to differentiate between the important and the unimportant in the selection of his moves. A beginner will have before him a vast array of moves to choose between and will have little idea as to which are the good moves and which are the bad moves.

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How Good are Your Reflexes?
Posted May 11th, 2009 by Robert Jamieson

Here at Chess Kids, our beloved leader, the Chess Guru, likes nothing better than when we find a new article promoting the benefits of chess. “Chess Makes your Children Smarter” or “Chess Prevents Violence in Schools” are the sort of topics that send him into raptures. I have therefore been racking my brain for a new angle to promote chess and I have an idea! What do you think of this?

CHESS IMPROVES YOUR REFLEXES!

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The Extinction of the Bookworm
Posted May 4th, 2009 by Robert Jamieson

My Thesaurus tells me that a “bookworm” is either an “enthusiastic reader” or an “insect eating books”. In an age of mass extinction I fear that both of these species should be placed on the endangered list if the result of my chess survey is anything to go by.

I’m teaching two new chess classes this term and at the start of each term I have the pupils fill in a small survey in with I ask for such information as “age”, “age learned chess” and “number of chess books that you have”.

I was very surprised to find that 74% of the students have no chess books at all. Nil, zilch, zippo!

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Who's a Lucky Boy?
Posted April 20th, 2009 by Robert Jamieson

Deep in the heart of Fitzroy there lives a very old, dowdy lady who has been a bit down on her luck lately. She is 143 years old and her name is the Melbourne Chess Club. A couple of months ago I received a phone call from Grant Szuveges, a member of the Melbourne Chess Club, seeking my support for his bid to become Club President and for his ideas to reform and rejuvenate the club.

Grant was successful in his bid to become Club President, and one of the first things that he did was to organise a raffle for the MCC Building fund.

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Keeping up with the News
Posted April 6th, 2009 by Robert Jamieson

Keen chess players will always want to stay up-to-date with the latest chess news and gossip. In my day this meant subscribing to about a dozen chess magazines from around the world and regular visits to the periodicals department of Monash University where I could look up the chess columns in the foreign newspapers such as the Times, The Guardian, The Jerusalem Post and so on.

Today it is much easier.

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