A tight contest with funding worries: the Scottish chess championship
July 24, 2011 by Dave Hewitt
Last Sunday, just as one experienced and popular competitor emerged victorious after several days of intense effort on the rainswept coast of Kent, so something similar was happening in the Stockbridge area of Edinburgh.
OK, so Ketevan Arakhamia-Grant – Keti, as she is known – plies her trade indoors, is of a somewhat slimmer build than Darren Clarke and her area of expertise is always likely to be way behind Clarke’s in terms of mainstream coverage and public awareness. But both victories were well received, and each event – the Open golf and the Scottish chess championship – appears to have left onlookers and officials satisfied with the fare on offer.
The 118th Scottish chess championship proved to be an interesting and tense nine-day contest. It was more competitive than generally anticipated, given that there had been a fair chance of the Ochamchira-born, Edinburgh-based player strolling away with the title rather than – as actually happened – having to scramble for it in the final round.
Arakhamia-Grant was the only grandmaster (GM) in the 37-player field, and the only serious challenge was expected to come courtesy of international master (IM) Craig Pritchett – Scottish champion in 1977 and 2005. IM is the next title down from GM – think BA as against MA, although either chess title is markedly harder to achieve than those academic honours. Outside bets for the title were two fast-improving young players – Clement Sreeves and Andrew Green – but beyond that it was hard to see how anyone else had much of a chance.
It was, therefore, a surprise when the leader at the start of the final round, with 6½ points out of 8, was Tony Dempsey – a little-known player from the Wandering Dragons club in Edinburgh. So little-known, in fact, as to cause 2007 champion Andrew Muir to comment on the Chess Scotland noticeboard that he had “never heard of him before this”.
The final round, with games potentially lasting six hours, saw Dempsey play Arakhamia-Grant, who was half a point behind (in chess a win counts as one point, a draw half). Also on 6/8, and facing each other, were Sreeves and Arakhamia-Grant’s husband Jonathan Grant, the 2006 champion. Given the nature of the tiebreak system, the only way for Arakhamia-Grant to take the title and the £1,200 first prize was for her to beat Dempsey and for the other game to be drawn – which is exactly what happened.
The top-board encounter ended first – after a lovely combination by the winner, but also a missed, near-impossible-to-spot chance to draw for Dempsey. There was then a curious domestic subplot, given that Jonathan Grant now only needed to prevent Sreeves from winning for the Grant household finances to benefit – although a win would have seen him take the title ahead of his wife. Chess is indeed a complicated game.
That Arakhamia-Grant had to battle for the title rather than cruise to it came about mainly through her having lost to Sreeves in round 3, then only drawing with Pritchett in a round 6 thriller. Pritchett later pointed out – in a magnanimous, such-is-life way – that he missed a clear chance to win that game because of trying to save time on the clock by repeating the position and thus allowing his opponent to claim a draw. He ended the tournament joint-second – on such brief but profound moments do victories come and go.
It could be argued, however, that the title ultimately hinged on two curious non-games. In round 6, Sreeves and Green opted to shake hands on a draw after just nine moves, while the much-anticipated Grant–Grant pairing in round 7 similarly lasted only 11 inconsequential moves before the café beckoned.
Both these games prompted collective groans from the watching online chess community, especially the clash of the unbetrothed. There has, in recent years, been a history of promising young Scottish players declining to play serious chess against each other. Whether this is linked to the lack of title-gaining success for Scots over the past decade or so is debatable – but there was frustration at seeing the practice recur in Edinburgh.
“Motwani, McNab, Condie, Mannion, Rowson, as juniors had the bottle to avoid premature draws – hardly coincidence they were the future titled players and Scot champs,” said 1996 and 1997 champion Douglas Bryson as he reeled off the names of various earlier Scottish chess stars – three eventual GMs and two IMs – who weren’t in the habit of quickly halving-out. “Of course easy to say sitting here on the sidelines,” Bryson added.
Whatever the ethics of quick draws (imagine if, say, Rangers and Celtic were able to shake hands and walk off the pitch five minutes into an Old Firm game), it seemed likely that one of the Sreeves–Green and Grant–Grant opt-outs would, come the final reckoning, look like a silly miscalculation, while the other would be seen as a masterstroke of energy-preservation – and so it proved.
So, a well-contested tournament with a clear and worthy winner: who could ask for more? Well, quite a few people on the Scottish chess scene – both players and organisers – remain uneasy about both the format and the future of the annual championship.
Full article here.
Nice job Keti!