French League, National Open, etc

June 10, 2008 • General

Hello, sorry for not blogging for a long while but I have been extremely busy between playing chess and traveling. These past couple of weeks have been very up and down. I will attempt to recount my various adventures over the past several weeks.

After the tournament in Chicago, I flew back to Newark and then immediately had to go to JFK in order to fly off to Nice, France. From there I flew to Paris early in the morning. After this, I ended up going to Rolland Garros to see the French Open with several teammates. It is hear that I must mention that on this day we ran into the Armenian Grandmasters Gabriel Sargissian and the late Karen Asrian. Before I continue on with the story, I must mention that it is a very sad story involving Asrian. Although he never was a top level grandmaster, he was a very solid player and generally a friendly person who always was smiling or laughing particularly during the last olympiad in Turin. My best wishes go out to the Armenian chess community and his family. After the French Open, I went to Evry where I played the French League. I played pretty well beating GMs Ninov,Schlosser as well as IM Adla before drawing the famous French GM Vaisser in the last round. Due to my very solid results, I actually won the medal for the board 1 performance with a score of 8.5/11.

After this, I flew back to New York and then off to Vegas the very next day. Unfortunately, I just played very badly as I achieved very bad positions against Friedel and Laylo before losing horribly to Pruess. Normally such results would not happen, but I think that in the end playing 3 different tournaments on 3 different time zones in 3 different regions of the world caught up with me in the end. Although I would have loved to have continued my streaks, all streaks must end at some point and the run I have had by winning my last 7 tournaments slow/rapid since last August was great. Now I will be taking a break to recharge my batteries before all of my big tournaments coming up in the fall.

Now I will probably go and die since the temperature out here in New York between yesterday and today has been right around 100°F or slightly over. Hopefully it cools off at some point. Till my next update all the best to everyone and enjoy the summer!