GilaChess Blog

Full results not out yet. In the meantime these are pictures of the top 10 winners of the Stonemaster Amateur.

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A perfect 6 out of 6 !! Suhairi Hussein is leading the Stonemaster Amateur at the moment.

Should have known from his fierce demeanor before the tournament started was a sign

Two more rounds to go. Can Suhairi continue his perfect form?

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Relief. With another loss my chances for prizes is virtually nil. Now I can play for fun.

Have not seen who is the leader is but Sahir Sarifdin has 4/5. Yat 3/5.

A total of 108 players are taking part in this tournament.

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Things certainly isn’t not easy in this amatuer  After 4 rounds I only have 2 points. The other bloggers like Yat Guo Jie (seeded first) is alo at 2/4. Firey Rook is at 1.5/4. 

However it’s certainly exciting with the time control of 20 minutes where many of the games resemble blitz rather than rapid towards the end. I know many of my games there were time scrambles.

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Arrived just before 9am to find Encik Suhairi in a fierce mood in a warm up game.

The playing hall at Pusat Kesukanan Cochrane, Cheras.

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Chess clocks, pieces, chess bags and other chess equipment being sold here too.

Arbiter busy re-checking and confirming the large number of players.

Old and young are playing. Age is no barrier.

Free water (with ice) to keep participan’t’s rehydrated and cool. A good idea.

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Got this email alert when the twins posted a new song on Youtube.
Condolences to Janice and Sonia on their grandmother’s passing.

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I don’t earn much from blogging and chess. Most of my income are supplemented from ad-hoc website projects. I have often thought that if my chess was the same level as my programming I’d be a Grandmaster . However, I’m not really proud of my skills as friends my age have graduated from programming to become project managers or bosses of their own business. I’m still a lowly programmer. No business or company to call my own. To make matters worse, my former programming students are earning more than me. The good news is that I’ve connected with some old friends and students and through them I hope to find more similiar ad-hoc programming projects like the one I just finished.

I’ll still maintain my chess blogs but will not be as active as before. Like I’ve said before, with so many active chess blogs today, less one GilaChess blog will hardly make a difference. Tomorrow, I’m looking forward to play in the Stonemaster Amature. You can expect some live updates on that even on this blog.

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Yeah that’s the fancy word they use to copy my program onto their computers. ‘Deployed’.

Finished my ‘tin can’ programs and they are now installed in one of the computers in this network room. The room is freezing with air-con being cranked up high. It’s like this 24/7. Their air-con bills must be through the sky . There is even holes on the floor where air con air is being blown from below. That’s to make sure that the computers never overheat and important programs are always kept running.

It took the better half of the day testing the program to see if my program allowed the different programs to talk to each other. They didn’t tell me that my program was supposed to work with more than 2 applications.

I am happy as at the end of the day, despite having to spend a few hours in the cold server room tweaking my code, everything was fixed and is working fine.

Now this blog can get back to chess.

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I recently got a funny programming project request that deals with connecting 2 computers for data transfer over a secure network connection. The program has to be written in PHP.  It is strange because by today’s standard there are ready made hardware and software solutions for that particular task. In essence it’s like connecting two rooms with a telephone line. Easily done and you can even pay a contractor for that. However, the client requires a custom solution which means building the connecting programs from ground up. The result is analogous to using 2 tin can phones to communicate between two rooms. Primitive but workable.

I’ve taken up the job as the pay is equivalent to a month’s salary for me (with advance payment on acceptance). For 2-3 days work, that’s good pay. Also, easy ad-hoc programming projects like these are rare. I am also very lucky the project has been passed around to others for around 6 months but no one could complete it. I am confident of finishing it as the solution is technical but simple. Something like checkmating with Knight and Bishop.

I have to sacrifice though. I’ll have to give a miss to the Cheras Challengers (FIDE rated) tourney starting tomorrow. Was looking forward to that.

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Chess is a universal game understood by different cultures and races. Unfortunately chess blogs aren’t. English is common but there are other languages too. I found a new plugin that translates the blog into 48 different languages. Of course the translations are less than perfect but it gets the gist of the blog post across (most of the time ).

In Malay:-

In Chinese:-

You can access the translation tools at the sidebar (look for the group of flags)

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Click here

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13 year old Tan Wei Hao finished undefeated in the KL Rapid Festival held this Sunday (14 March 2010).

He won 4 games but had to settle for a draw against Yat Guo Jie in round 3 and another draw after a tense last round battle vs Mohamed Ismail (Max).

From the picture above, this was the position.

Moves continued..

1… Kb8 2. Rf7 Re1+ 3. Kd2 Qc8 4. Rc7 Rd1+ 5. Kxd1 Nc3+ 6. Rxc3 Qxc3 7. Qg8+
Qc8 8. Qxc8+ Kxc8

1/2-1/2

Full results here

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Blogger Yat stayed back in KL instead of going to NAG in Penang. He took part in a simul against CM Collin Madhavan and got some consolation for missing NAG.

It’s good to see more chess simuls are they are good marketing tools to make chess more interesting to the public.

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