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This is exactly what happened to yours truly, Sagar Shah, as he won the XXXIII ZMDI Open 2014 ahead of fourteen grandmasters and nine International Masters.
Sagar Shah (2339), the author of these lines, won the tournament with a score of 7.0/9
and a performance of 2657. In the process he gained 68 Elo points, as well as €2000!
The nine-day event was known as the Schach (chess) Festival because there was chess simply everywhere. Apart from the main open tournament, there was a B category for players below 2100, a C category for players below 1900, a blitz tournament that lasted 17 rounds, a holiday and tourist’s tournament of seven rounds, and last but not the least the Pegasus Chess Summit which involved great players like Korchnoi, Taimanov, Uhlmann and many more.
The main sponsor of this tournament was Zentrum Mikroelektronik Dresden (ZMDI). It is
a company that manufactures fabless semiconductors and is based in Dresden.
Let us first focus on the main event of the festival, which was the ZMDI Open 2014, held from the 15th-23rd August 2014. There were nine rounds, and the time control was 90 minutes + 30 minutes after move 40, with 30 seconds increment from move number one. The tournament had 112 participants. The top seed of the event was the very strong Hungarian GM Ferenc Berkes (2668). It was a great achievement for me (Sagar Shah, Elo 2339) to win the tournament, since I started as the 24th seed. More than a tournament report, this is my personal account of how I was able to win the tournament.
The tournament was held at the beautiful Wyndham Garden Hotel. It is situated quite a distance from the Dresden city center, in a very quiet and serene location, which is perfect for a chess tournament. A lot of fresh air and absolutely no noise! That’s exactly what chess players need.
Beautiful life size chess sets greet you as you enter the hotel premises
There was also something rarely seen in chess tournaments: full-fledged chess shops. The shops were huge and they sold just about everything related to chess.
So many of the recent ChessBase DVDs
Every imaginable chess book
In this digital age I am wondering why they were trying to sell analog clocks!
Beautiful chess souvenirs. After resisting the temptation of buying something
from these chess shops, you could finally enter the playing hall...
... which was just perfect with the right temperature and lighting
A small video of the tournament hall. The organizers played some nice motivational music before
the round. It really helped me to get into the groove for the game!
The chess boards and pieces used were of excellent quality
The arbiters and organizers were dressed smartly in black suits and were extremely helpful to all players
You can say that the conditions were simply perfect to play a nice tournament without any hindrances.
I came to the tournament after playing four tournaments in Spain. That was almost 50 days of continuous effort. So my main intention was to just enjoy chess – to prepare less and to use the energy that I had conserved during the games.
I started off the tournament with two nice wins against 2066 and 2117 rated players. In the third round I met the strong GM from Russia Viacheslav Zakhartsov. The opening was extremely complicated and I somehow managed to exchange the queens. While I was searching on the best way to press my small advantage I suddenly noticed that my opponent had made a huge mistake. The end was swift and he lost a piece.
GM Viacheslav Zakhartsov in his typical thinking pose.
He managed to recover well and scored 7.0/9, finishing fourth.
Usually when I start off well in a tournament I tend to take on a lot of pressure. I prepare hard for the next games exhaust my energy reserves. This time I was not going to make the same mistake. I decided to go to the Dresden Stadtfest (city festival) and with my wife Amruta I took one of the craziest rides I have ever seen in my life!
The best thing that this ride did to me was to give me an adrenaline rush. After the near-death
experience things like lack of preparation and landing in a minus position didn’t really cross my mind.
My good friend Petar Arnaudov (2426) from Bulgaria was my fourth round opponent
The game swung from being completely winning for me to equal. However when both of us came under acute time pressure, I was able to win thanks to his weak back rank.
In the fifth round I played a nice positional game against IM Alexander Belezky (2446) from Ukraine. On the white side of a Bogo-Indian I gained a small edge from the opening which I never let go. In the end I gave up my queen for two rooks. The rooks were just too strong and in the end my opponent had to throw in the towel. I liked the last part of the game in which my rooks dominated his queen and launched a mating attack against his king.
IM Alexander Belezky was the winner of the seven round Holiday and Tourist tournament
After that game I launched into the sole lead with a score of 5.0/5.
– Continued in part two –
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