Danny Gormally, the top seed, fought back from a fifth-round blunder to claim the British Rapidplay title (one-hour games) after 11 rounds in two days at Peterborough last weekend and so continued a surge of form and creativity in his late 40s. His victory came after he tied for first on 9/11 with Ireland’s No 1 woman, Trisha Kanyamarala, and won their two-game blitz playoff 1.5-0.5.
Gormally was already one of England’s best players in the early 2000s, but after he missed out on the national title he played less for a few years. Then he made his name with the books Play Like the Pros and Calculate like a Grandmaster, both aimed at tournament competitors, and by successful coaching of pupils including the top-10 England woman Zoe Varney. His latest titles, Tournament Battle Plan and Chess Analysis: Reloaded, again focus on a pragmatic approach for ambitious competitors.
Gormally’s winning Rapidplay was highlighted by two critical episodes, a round-five disaster and a round-10 checkmating tactic.
Earlier, Gormally won a pretty miniature where his opponent’s optimistic queen’s side castling was punished by an unusual diagonal skewer of both rooks.
For much of the event, 15-year-old Shreyas Royal, campaigning to become England’s youngest grandmaster, had played the best chess, with well-prepared openings and incisive middle games, as in this win against a strong IM.
Kanyamarala, who tied for first before losing the playoff, is Ireland’s most successful female player ever. At 18, she already has two of the three norms needed for the women’s grandmaster title. Her older brother Tarun, who also competed at Peterborough, is an IM, and both are first-year students at Carlow College, Leinster.
A feature of the event was the large number of junior entrants, many of them preteens, who scored well and scalped higher-rated opponents. Most still have to achieve consistency, but two preteens who again impressed after previous successes at the Hastings and Cambridge Opens were Oleg Verbytski, of Charlton, and Kai Hanache, of Hammersmith.
The best measure of progress and consistency for juniors is the monthly Fide rating list, which can be set to show the top 100 names globally or nationally at standard, rapid or blitz time rates and where England’s Supratit Banerjee and Bodhana Sivanandan are regularly at or near the top. Sivanandan, who shared the women’s third prize at Peterborough, will be competing in her first women’s all-play-all, the Menchik Memorial, in honour of the world champion killed by a V-1 flying bomb in 1944, from 22 to 26 March.
For decades, the British Rapidplay was only competed for at Halifax and entries were limited. Its popularity at its new venue was clear, but there were some problems. Alan Walton, a respected older expert, wrote in the English Chess Forum: “With the high volume of families present, the hotel couldn’t accommodate the volume, the restaurant/bar area was full all day with nowhere to sit down and eat/relax between games (only option on Saturday was to go back to your room, Sunday was stand up for 45-30 mins until the next game).”
Most players took only B&B accommodation for the Saturday night, so had to play rounds 7-11 on Sunday after checking out of their rooms.
The tournament had 215 entrants, of whom 132 were rated below Fide 2000, that is BCF 175 in old money, and a level below which some international opens require higher entry fees from low-rated players. That may be the answer to overcrowding for 2025, especially if the ECF wants to encourage more elite GMs to compete. The World Rapid is now a major event with Magnus Carlsen, so its British version may need a further upgrade.
The men’s and women’s world championship Candidates, to decide the 2024 world title challengers and due to be played in Toronto in April, were in danger of being switched to Spain this week after it emerged that Canada had approved hardly any visas.
Fide made a public appeal to the Canadian government and all player and official visas have been approved and are now being processed normally, so that Fide was able to lift this weekend’s deadline.
It would have been bizarre if the event had had to be moved, since a Canadian venue should favour the two US competitors, Fabiano Caruana and Hikaru Nakamura, and thus significantly improve the chances of a North American world champion.
Canada has not previously hosted any Candidates tournaments, but was the venue of one of the most famous Candidates matches of all time. Bobby Fischer’s 6-0 sweep of Mark Taimanov in 1971 took place in Vancouver, and another, Fischer’s 6-0 against Bent Larsen, was played at Denver, Colorado. In both cases the losers cited the pressure they felt from facing the American on his home territory as one cause of their devastating defeats.
Meanwhile, 19-year-old Nodirbek Abdusattorov, who missed qualifying for the Candidates, has advanced to world No 4 after his victory with a round to spare in Prague this week.
3910: 1 Ra2! b4/d4 2 Ra5! b4/d4 3 Kd7! Kxf6 4 Bxd4 mate.
