Apologies for non-blogging ...

I have been overseas in Malaysia and Singapore for the last two and half weeks and could not blog. I also had to miss the Doeberl Cup and the SIO. Will summarise the achievements of juniors in a later blog when I can and after digesting the results.

Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) for my son, there wasn't any chess tournaments I could locate in KL or Singapore whilst we were there. Malaysia just finished its national championships in early April whilst the KL championships just finished. So my son had a chess-free holiday (except for a brief period on the laptop practising some tactic). Sigh... I think it is going to be reflected in his chess results over the next week or so. There is Ryde-Eastwood Chess Championships (Preliminaries) every Wednesday and the NSWJCL Primary Schools comp begins Friday week.

I have just spent the last few hours catching up on local chess news and there is a discussion on the Australian Juniors on the Aus ChessChat on the issue whether there should only be one round a day or two rounds a day. It seems that the latter is favoured by parents due to costs issue. But it was good to see some juniors piping in with the views and supporting the present one round a day. Calling all juniors: If you feel strongly about playing more than one round a day at the Aus Juniors, you should contribute to the discussion at http://www.chesschat.org/showthread.php?t=9640.

There are some postings which suggest that a majority of parents and chess juniors themselves are in favour of two round a day. I favour only one round a day myself. Perhaps I am a traditionalist and prefer the championship to be fought over a terrain and under rules which grant the utmost advantage to both players, who play at their best. I am not sure how good the chess will be with two rounds a day. There was an argument that the weekenders in the UK in the 1970s had three rounds a day and that even GMs participated. But then, they are not playing for the championship, are they? And, if my history is not wrong, it was exactly the horrendous conditions of weekenders comps in the UK that led to such inventions of of openings such as the Grand Prix Attack, and the English Attack.

More to come......

Youngest girl chessplayer with WGM title?

This is a quick post. Thanks to The Closet Grandmaster (http://closetgrandmaster.blogspot.com/) for the video link. Is she the youngest girl chessplayer with WGM title? Usually, my response to media reports on "prodigies" is that it is a media's version of a freak show. Non-chessplayers are meant to go, "Ohhhh!", "Ahhhh!", "How Amazing!!", etc. A fellow junior chessplayer even call my son (when he was 7 years old) a freak. Now was that meant in kidspeak where freak is awesome, similar to "wicked" being "very good? Or was it "freak" as in well, freakish?

The video report below was quite well done and nothing like a freak show.