Indians win First Saturday May-2017!

Indians win First Saturday May-2017!

Hungary has a famous tournament called: "First Saturday." Practically every month, starting on the first Saturday, many international tournaments are organized in Budapest, Hungary.

Budapest

This gives the chance to young players to score norms for FM, IM or even GM! In fact, Caruana, who recently has been substituted as second in the world by Wesley So, when younger he moved to Europe, and he played in the July 2007 of the First Saturday GM tournament, winning with 7 points out of 9, and obtaining his GM title at the age of 14.

This month the tournament was played from May 6th to the 16th with a magical result for IM Roy Saptarshi, 6 out of 9 in the GM section!

 
Saptarshi made only 2.5 out of the first 5 games, but then he began to play harder and won three games in a row, reaching round 8 with 5.5, then the Norvegian FM Sebastian Mihajlov, who dominated the tournament for the first seventh rounds, had two losses in a row, and that sealed the tournament, and the win for Saptarshi!

In the IM section another Indian: FM Sarkar Rajdeep won it with 7 points out of 9 realizing an IM norm!

Here are their games:

And now the games of the other winner!

Notice in the following game the importance to know pawn endgames, opposition, and triangulation, especially with today's time controls, where one could be in time trouble at the end of the game!

Another important learning experience of an Open tournament is the meeting between players with a big difference in rating, as in the following game. Watching many of these games, between players which have 3-400 points difference or more, can actually show common mistakes, and we can eventually learn from the stronger player how to take advantage of them!

Toth Bela was famous in the 70ies and 80ies in Italy, he won 3 or 4 major Italian national tournaments, and he nearly reached the GM title. He is now over 70 years old, but we can see he still can fight, and the young opponent wins only over a very long game.

About the Author

Davide Nastasio is a novel chess aficionado, who has made of chess his spiritual tool of improvement, and self-discovery. One of his favorite quotes is from the great Paul Keres: "Nobody is born a master. The way to mastery leads to the desired goal only after long years of learning, of struggle, of rejoicing, and of disappointment..." He is one of the main writers for ChessCafe on Chessbase products, he authors articles on British Chess Magazine, and he is one of the main contributors of Georgia Chess Magazine in the new electronic format: Georgia Chess News. He is an active player, and organizes and directs chess tournaments.