As the season has been kicked off with a simul exhibition, we organized our first internal blitz tournament of the season. With 9 players in the starting line up, we played 7 rounds with 5 min + 3 sec increment as time control. Too be honest I was quite a bit surprised about some of the results. It's of course inherent to blitz time control, but still it was interesting to see some players winning/losing where I didn't expect that. And no... I'm not just saying that, because I played poorly myself :P.
Now one might ask: But Ralf, what's up with the title? What does this have to do with the king and why are you talking German? Well, if you pronounce Kaiser in Dutch you get Keizer and that is pairing system we used for this tournament (ok, a bit far fetched). While this is a great system to use for an internal competition which is split over multiple days where people are unable to play all rounds, this apparently is not a great system for a quick Blitz tournament. There's an interesting algorithm behind this, that doesn't only look at the actual scoring, but at the relative scoring against opponents strength etc.
Long story short, due to this wonderful algorithm and Arda's tactical play :), he actually ended up as first, while having a board point less than both Paul and Ad. This does make me quite excited about the upcoming KNSB and NBSB competition by the way, as Paul is one of our new club members who will be playing there and I now have very very very high expectations of him :P.
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