Victorian Olympians Part 1

The current chess Olympiad sees only one current Victorian representative, Sally Yu, board 3 for the women's team. Sally started off with a good win in the first round playing black Rivera Borg of Malta. The game was an Exchange Queen's Gambit where Sally was able to nullify any threats that her opponent came up with, while creating her own threats which won her an exchange. Sally is the fist Victorian representative in the women's team since Anastasia Sorokina played in 2004 and that was the only Victorian appearnace this century in the women's squad!

In the men's team, there has been more Victorian representation:

2010 D. Johansen

2008 D. Johansen

2006 N. Speck

2004 D. Johansen

2002 D. Johansen, N. Speck, M. Gluzman

2000 D. Johansen, G. West, L. Sandler

To be fair, GM Darryl Johansen could have played this time, but he ruled himself out of contention. I'll have a look further back into the twentieth century later on during this Olympiad!

Anyway, here's Sally's first game from the 2012 Istanbul Olympiad.

Sources of Information

This blog will only ever be as good as the information it presents. At the moment, I am trawling through club websites, the State Association website and other organisations to try to find information to put on the calendar, and to write posts about. But I'm only one person, and this site would be a whole lot better if others contributed information about events, stories, news or anything related to chess in Melbourne and Victoria. Last week I received an email from Nigel Barrow about a school tournament in Bendigo which I immediately put up here. As long as the material is not offensive (there isn't usually much offensive to do with chess tournaments or hangouts) I will happily promote Victorian chess events here.

Today, I met with Chess Victoria President Leonid Sandler for a coffee and a chat. We regularly meet up to talk about the local chess scene, and chess generally. The upcoming Olympiad was the main subject of discussion. Leonid and I are both immigrants to this country and will both be following our countries of birth closely (Latvia and England), but we will of course be hoping for Australian success. While there are no Victorians represented in the men's team, we have Sally Yu representing the women's team and many of our youngsters representing Australia at the youth Olympiad which is being run alongside the main event. We wish good luck to all Australian Olympians!

Leonid and I did have a mild disagreement about this site, and the Chess Victoria website. I have been very critical of the CV website and Leonid explained that their website had been hacked 3 times and they were having difficulty recovering after these attacks. I don't know why anyone would want to attack a chess site or whether it was part of a hack on a wider scale. But at least for the moment, Chess Victoria's website is suffering a little. He assured me that all the necessary information can still be found on website, and that was where the main disagreement occurred! Look, I hope that CV get a good website together, and I would certainly be willing to pass on all the information from this site AND still write a news blog here.

Leonid also pointed out that FM Nick Speck has made a comeback to competitive chess in Malaysia. Nick scored 6.5/9 on board 1 in the Rapid teams event, and will hopefully be another Victorian IM soon. Nick didn't play for the Australian team in the tournament, but played in a team with fellow Victorian resident Wang Sheng Lee (Singapore).