On September 9th the Dutch blitz championship was being held in Rotterdam. This year's edition our following members have participated: Pepijn van Hees, Nuwan Liyanage, Ralf Weijers and Guus Bollen. The time control was set on 3 minutes with a 2 second increment and all rounds combined we had about 24 rounds to play. I can tell you.... that is a lot.
Things very soon got heated and this I actually mean literally. It was a hot day outside and unfortunally the facility didn't have any airco. So with over 200 participants sitting very close together, the temperature inside was soon higher than outside which was something like 30+ Celsius already. Ok, enough complaining for now and trying to find excuses for my poor play this tournament ;).
I've been playing quite a number of tournaments before and so have Guus, but for Pepijn and Nuwan, playing a tournament this size was something they had not experienced (much) yet. Below you see an example of Pepijn trying to bluf his opponent with his hat, as he was able to keep a cool head with all this heat :P.
Nuwan on the other hand was trying to distract his opponents by putting his wallet in front of him, hinting on bribing possibilities. So, as you can see, there is more to chess then just chess :P.
Kidding aside, both of them played a nice tournament, where they were able to gain quite some experience. Guus was playing quite well also, but as my own play was so bad and he was playing on the successful side of the room I was unable to have a look :D. My first pool went well, then completely messed up in the 2nd pool and was able to only recover a bit in the 3rd one.
So after these 3 pool rounds (of 6 players) had finished, all of us were being put in the final pools of 12 players. I'll save you all the details, because I simply don't remember :P, but after struggling through these final rounds and the smoke had cleared, we came to the conclusion that the Litho Knights were actually quite successful.
Pepijn was able to get some of his entrance fee back by ending on the 3rd place of pool R:
Nuwan unfortunally just missed out on a prize. He ended on a shared 3rd place in pool Q, but as he had lost the game against the other number 3, he now ended as 4th and had to just miss out.
I was able to peak on the right moment apparently, because during the final round I scored 8 out of 11 and ended on the 3rd place of pool K.
Guus ended up in pool E, which was quite a strong pool, looking at average rating there. Despite that, he was able to end 3rd as well.
The full scores can be found here:
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