Friday, 12 October 2012

Setting the record straight - IM Daniel Fernandez is the first Singaporean qualifier for the SportAccord World Mind Games Candidates by Junior Tay

A couple of days ago, I realised that IM Daniel Fernandez was actually the first local chap to qualify for the World Mind Games Candidates when he made the top 15 in the 1st preliminary on 17 September 2012. In fact, he got a tougher field than the rest of us as other qualifiers from his event include 2 GMs (eventual winner Mekhitarian and Nikola Djuric), another 5 IMs and 2 FMs. Singapore has a total of  5 qualifiers (IM Daniel Fernandez, Jr Tay, FM Daniel Chan, FM Tin Jingyao and NM Olimpiu Urcan) with one more preliminary event left to play (October 20 2012, 10pm).

IM Daniel Fernandez

Here's a recent blitz game which Daniel won with his beloved Smsylov Caro Kann.
More news on the Sportsaccord World Mind Games event can be found here.

1 comment:

  1. Junior, this reminds me of something from more than 20 years ago. There was a contemporary of mine, lets call him MT, who in this opening at blitz kept playing 9.Ne6??! against another player, let's call him FY. This he would do repeatedly and lose repeatedly. All of us watching (and kibitzing) were puzzled - why give a free piece? But MT doggedly stuck to his 'opening repertoire' and of course, FY happily kept taking the piece, beating off the minimal attack and crushing him mercilessly in a variety of piece-up middlegames and endgames. It was great entertainment but also a mystery - MT was after all a pretty strong player. Finally we found out when he blurted out, after losing game 37: "But Deep Blue played like this to beat Kasparov!!" Chong Ghee

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