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National Cities Heading For
Entry Record
By Arvind Aaron
The 10th National Cities Chess Championship will start from Sunday at the
Hall of Chess in the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium in Chennai from Feb 11. It
will run until February 15 and will be a 8-round Swiss on four boards.
It will be organised by the T.Nagar Chess Academy on behalf of the Tamil
Nadu State Chess Association. The prize fund of Rs.60,000 is up by
Rs.10,000 from the 2003 edition when it was organised at Vijayawada. The
Shipping Corporation of India will be the sponsor and there are Ministers
to inaugurate and distribute the prizes.
About 30-35 teams are expected to play in this five-day competition.
Significant increase over the eight teams that played at Vijayawada when
Kanchipuram won. We want to encourage team events though chess is an
individual game, said D.V.Sundar, Secretary of the AICF at the meet the
press at the Tamil Nadu Cricket Association Club on Feb 9.
The top two teams will advance to play in the Asian Cities Championship
which will be held at Tehran from March 1-9 this year. India has never won
the Asian Cities Championship which is held every alternate year.
In the 30 teams that are already in the fray, V.Ravichandran, Joint
Secretary of the TNSCA said 15 are from Chennai city itself. Chennai had
played host to this event in 1993 and is the second venue after Nagpur to
stage it twice.
Chennai with two 2700 rated players (V.Anand and K.Sasikiran) is clearly
the strongest chess playing city in Asia and the second strongest chess
city in the world after Moscow. The stature of the event however has not
attracted the best to play. Chennai has never won this event and this time
the best chance to win the title knocks on the door. In the past, players
who live in Chennai have played in winning teams like Chrompet (which has
a Chennai pincode!) and Kanchipuram, the temple and saree town.
Teams from as far as Jammu, Mumbai, Kozhikode and Kolkata are expected to
play. Chennai leads with 15 teams and behind them are Bangalore (3),
Kadapa (2), Hyderabad, etc. With IM R.R.Laxman, IM R.Balasubramaniam,
Praveen Kumar, Ram S Krishnan, Chennai A will be the top seed. Chennai B
will have G.B.Prakash, N.Sudhakar Babu and the Indian Bank stars. Many of
the stars are going to be tiny school boys who would be stars of the
future
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Published on : 10, February, 2007
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