Gawain Jones wins Harpa Blitz

The Harpa Blitz had a good turnout as usual as 75 players were registered for the tournament. Some of them didn’t last very long for various reasons but all in all around 70 player showed up with their gamefaces on! As usual the tournament is supposed to be mostly for fun and due to beverages being allowed in the playing hall and noise from evening Harpa events the tournament is traditionally not rated.

Nontheless this will not stop the competitive nature of chess players and despite a relaxed mood the battle on the chessboard was fierce! 9 rounds were contested with the World Championship timecontrol of 3 minutes with a 2 second increment.

The tournament #1 seed the strong English player Gawain Jones started the tourament in impressive fashion and racked up the wins. Same thing can be said about Tigran Petrosian who beat every opponent except Gawain in the first 7 rounds. Gawain led therefore with a full house while Tigran was second. A number of players then trailed with 5.5 points.

The tournament opened up a little bit when Jorden van Foreest managed to take down Gawain in the 8th round and this actually set up a very exciting last round where Gawain had 7 points while 3 players had 6.5 and one of them would be playing against Gawain!

In the last round Gawain managed to get a required draw and despite Jorden van Foreest catching up, Gawain won on tiebreaks. Third place belonged to Tigran Petrosian.

Poker pro Dan Smith had a nice showing placing highest of the non-titled players with a very respectable 6 out of 9

Uncharacteristically Dan Smith seems to be allowing a read here as he has driven his opponent’s king in the middle of the board, Dan indeed won the game!

Mike Mcdonald won the raffle after the tournament and got to choose a chess book from Stefan’s chess book store.