There were some quite promising young players participating in the Swedish Championship this year. Jung Min, who won the championship last year, was in the race all the way to the end, and his game seem to steadily improve:
The younger generation are quite a lot more concrete and attentive to ways to force the game. In round 1 Jung Min found a sneaky way defuse Erik Blomqvist’s initiative:
Looking forward to more games from Jung Min.
No other Swedish chess player has received as many epithet’s as Jonny Hector, a player who, in his best moments, can truly stir fear in his opponents:
As Black, Jonny has played the Slav for as long as I can remember. At times someone thinks it a good idea to play the Exchange Slav against Jonny. It usually does not end well:
Next I will comment a few games from the Swedish Championship, and then the Chess Olympiad, in Chennai, starts on Friday. It is my intention to test my ability to write something every day there. Anyone who will take a bet that I will make it? 🙂
The Swedish Championship took place in the beginning of July, and I was one of ten participants in the top group. I started out badly, squandering good positions in the early rounds and only getting back on track by taking some ridiculous risks (or, by pure luck, perhaps). My game from round was symptomatic:
In the end I scrambled to a third place, behind Jonny Hector and Jonathan Westerberg. Next I will comment one of Jonny’s games.
When I started playing chess in the early 80:s, there were very few books on chess available in Swedish, and the first one I got hold of was “Stormästare” (“Grandmaster”), by Lars Grahn and Sixten Johansson, with games by Sweden’s three grandmasters. I remember playing through the game below, getting my first idea of what a positional squeeze meant.
It took me eight years from when I first played in a club, until I finally saw the Man himself. I was going to a tournament in northern Spain together with Christian Jepson, when he suddenly wispered, “do you know who is sitting ahead of us?” I looked, but was not able to tell who it was. Christian explained: “It is God”. I had finally seen Ulf.