Sesquicentennial Australian Women's Masters

DIS 2016 Australian Women's Masters

Report from Melbourne by Jamie Kenmure

Fresh off the back of organising a highly successful Australian Championships, the Sesquicentennial (150 year) celebrations continue with the 2016 Australian Women's Masters! All interested players were invited to apply for participation, and the top ten applicants rated over 2000 FIDE were given a place in the field. The format is a ten player WIM-norm round robin, lasting from Thursday January 14th to Friday January 22, 2016. Time control: 90 minutes for 40 moves, followed by 30 minutes to finish, with 30 seconds per move starting from move one. Prizes: first A$900, second A$600 and third A$300. The venue is the Melbourne Chess Club, 66 Leicester Street, Fitzroy, Melbourne. Games start at 2 p.m. daily.

Round 1 got underway on a cool Thursday Melbourne afternoon, with the players thankful that the temperature was in the moderate mid 20s rather than the scorching mid 40s of the previous day! On the board, the play was generally very combative, with most games producing hard-fought contests.

In the clash between Poland's Maria Gosciniak (right) and Kristyna Novosadova from the Czech Republic Novosadova had an extra pawn, but Gosciniak blockaded it and a draw was agreed on move 50.

Hanna Leks and Ticia Gara played a fighting game, with Gara winning with a nice tactic

Round two (above) saw four of five games being decisive, with players pushing for every point and half point they can get. The most dramatic of those was the game between Maria Gosciniak and Xiaobing Gu, which saw Gosciniak losing on time when she held a slight edge!

Round three of the Australian Women's Masters saw the leaders move further away from the other players, with three players now clear of the rest of the field. Gu Xiaobing (above right) is outright leader with 3.0/3, with Deimante Daulyte (left) in outright second with 2.5/3. Ticia Gara in outright third on 2.0/3. Although this makes for an exciting contest for the top places, particularly with many of the leading players yet to play each other, it places more pressure on players who were hoping to achieve a norm in the tournament, as the score required moves closer to the number of games remaining in the tournament.

All pairings, results and cross table

Replay all games

As a special service here are all the games from the first three rounds, with short introductions to each. You can select the games from the dropdown menu above the board.

During the event the players can check out some other things Melbourne has to offer,
including the Melbourne Zoo ...

... and the Australian Open tennis

The tournament is being held with the support the Melbourne Chess Club,
which provides the venue, the FIDE DIS commission and Chess Victoria.

Links Official tournament site (Facebook) Download all games in PGN You can use ChessBase or any of our Fritz compatible chess programs to replay the games in PGN. You can also download our free Playchess client, which will in addition give you immediate access to the chess server Playchess.com.