Friday, January 28, 2011

Salesforce.com Chess Tournament Round 2: Ashik vs Ron

I won the round 2 of chess tournament in Salesforce.com a little earlier playing with black. My opponent was Ron Pragides who sits in seventh floor in the same building as mine. He is Senior Director of Software Engineering. Shishir and Maithili joined me to watch the game. The chess clock we had actually ran out of battery so Ron did an interesting thing. He downloaded a chess clock in his iPhone where we set 20 minutes for each of us. It served the purpose fine!



Ron made the first mistake but I made a follow up mistake too to bring him back in the game. So it went down to Ron to make the final mistake by him through which I was able to mate him. Unlike round 1, this time I was ahead of time.

Monday, January 24, 2011

Salesforce.com Chess Tournament Round 1 - Ashik vs Didier

I played the first round of the four round chess tournament in Salesforce.com. I won with White, although I felt I am out of touch by a good margin due to the lack of practice. My opponent was Didier Prophete who is PMTS and sits in 3rd floor in the same building as I do. Also I took lot more time than my opponent to move.

However, I will do some practice before next rounds so that I don't make simple miscalculations.



Soon after this, I exchanged the queens to make sure there is nothing left in the board except my Rook and Didier's Bishop while I have a bunch of queens side passed pawns to march for promotion. So he resigned here while I had some 3 minutes left in the clock as opposed to his 9 minutes.

Saturday, January 1, 2011

Great Chess Players In History (Non-English)

I got an email from the following blog owner where he started compiling all the great chess players career brief in short.

http://comentariosdeajedrez.blogspot.com/

While this is great, this is in Spanish or some other language as I have no idea. I wish I would get the English version of it somehow.

Friday, February 26, 2010

Bangladeshi GM Ziaur Rahman To Boost Chess In Malaysia

After the recent post by Susan Polgar on Niaz Bhai's chess initiative in Bangladesh, today I saw Polgar blogging on Zia's residency in Malaysia to boost chess development there. Wonderful that chess players in Bangladesh are part of news more frequently now alhtough we are far from the mainstream sports news like cricket and football.

http://susanpolgar.blogspot.com/2010/02/resident-gm-in-malaysia.html

http://thestar.com.my/lifestyle/story.asp?file=/2010/2/26/lifeliving/5738116&sec=lifeliving

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

GM Niaz Murshed on Regular Title Tournaments in Bangladesh

I was very happy to read Bangladeshi Grand Master Niaz Murshed's initiative on promoting chess in Bangladesh and subsequently effecting the chess trends of South Asia by arranging regular title tournaments at different venues in Bangladesh. Susan Polgar posted the entry below on a note by the first GM of South Asia Niaz (remember that Anand was second to him) here -

http://susanpolgar.blogspot.com/2010/02/note-by-gm-niaz-murshed.html

You may also have a quick look at -

http://thefidetrainer.blogspot.com/2010/02/first-saturday-type-tournaments-in.html