After a long wait for a tournament in Kelantan, one of Kelantan Chess Association (PCNK) members organised a small scale blitz chess tournament on invitation basis to fulfill a lengthy holiday in conjunction of Deepavali. At first, 10 Kelantan players were invited to play a round robin tournament at the Sultan Muhammad IV stadium, but in the end, there were 14 players turning up:
1. Nasrul Humaimi (the organiser)
2. Khairul Aznan
3. Muhammad Ariez
4. Marzuki
5. Nik Mohd Nazri
6. Haziq Rozhisham
7. Norazlin
8. Rozhisham
9. Irfan
10. Mohd Azizul
11. Hilmi
12. Khairul
13. Wan Mohd Adli
14. Wan Mohd Amirul
After the customary 13 rounds of play, the organiser emerged as champion by defeating almost everybody. Even Yours Truly was checkmated without any mercy as he was in demolition mode. Second and third were taken by siblings Wan Mohd Amirul and Wan Mohd Adli, respectively while Yours Truly was fourth after losing to all three mentioned and winning the rest. The full results are shown below:
Although youthfulness of the siblings proved to be the catalyst for them to excel in the fast paced chess that night, the youngest player in the tournament, Haziq, has a lot to do after losing all his games. It turned out that he could not muster his moves quickly enough to counter his opponents, and this is quite perplexing. Hopefully he will do better in the upcoming UTP blitz tournament in November.
Some pictures from various sources (credit to Nasrul and Ariez rare CANON camera):
