Aug 17

Written by: Hikaru
8/17/2008 7:24 PM

Ohaio gozaimasu from Japan! The tournament reached its finale yesterday as I won again to finish on 7/7. Overall, I did not have to face anyone particularly strong as the second highest ranked player, FM Akira Watanabe 2356 (Japan's Number 1) did not win his sixth round game to force a penultimate showdown. Therefore, I cruised and probably am sitting right at 2700 Fide now. I'll just wait to see what the actual numbers are come October. For now though, I am going to shift my focus to the Montreal International Round Robin since it is my last rated event before the October Fide rating list. In general though, I find that paying too much attention to ratings (Live Top Ratings in particular) is quite a distraction and not worth the stress or effort to look. My attitude is just to play every game one at a time and see where you end up in the end. I would like to once again extend my thanks to Ms. Watai the head of the Japanese Chess Association for inviting me for the 3rd year in a row. Although the competition itself has not been overly tough, it is always nice to be able to relax, win a tournament and socialize with new people. Hopefully I will be back next year so that I can also fulfill another goal of mine which is to climb Mount Fuji!

No doubt most of the people who are reading this blog are from ICC, so I will mention my brief blitz session today. There are many detractors who choose to say plenty of less than respectful things when I decide to play out a drawish position. First of all, people must understand this is ICC, not over the board chess. Secondly, there is no RULE against playing on in drawn positions on ICC no matter how drawn it is. In general, I find that "anything goes" on ICC. Plenty of people will say one thing yet when in the actual situation, they will not follow their own words. When I play on ICC, I just try to have a fun time and enjoy myself, so I would appreciate it if, in the future, others learn to stop taking ICC so seriously. This would help immensely as the atmosphere would be more enjoyable. One last point which I would like to make is that AndrinoGiardino is, without a doubt, Levon Aronian. I do not know the reasoning behind GM Agdestein's comments saying that it was Carlsen, but I am quite certain that it isn't.

My plans for right now are to go shower, finish packing and catch my flight back to New York. I have about four days before I head off to Montreal, so I will try to relax and just do a little more final preparations for the tournament. Also, I will be adding games weekly to the "games" section of my website for those who are interested. If anyone has any feedback in terms of the recent changes (events,games,what's new etc) just let me know.

Hikaru

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