UKM KL Masters starts

The 3rd KL Open has just finished yesterday and today we have another major tournament. The UKM Masters starts today at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM ) in Bangi. This tournament is jointly sponsored by UKM and KLCA (Kuala Lumpur Chess Association) and supported by MCF (Malaysian Chess Federation).

I am very happy to see a local university sponsoring such a tournament. Hopefully this will encourage other education institution to support chess. This tournament will be have IM norm possibilities. The minimum points is six out of nine games.

Malaysia has two participants, Nicholas Chan and Mohamed Abdul Haq. Nicholas played very well in the KL Open, it was unfortunate that he met a number of lower rated players. Nicholas missed the IM norm by half point.

The table below shows the list of participants.

Title	Name	Country	Rating
GM	Iuldashev Saidali	UZB	2511
IM	Tirto	INA	2402
IM	Situru Nathanael	INA	2358
	Thakur Akash	IND	2355
	Ankit R. Rajpara	IND	2334
FM	Fernandez Daniel	SIN	2299
FM	Yee Soon Wei	BRU	2209
	Nirav Y Rajasuba	IND	2183
FM	Chan Nicholas	MAS	2398
	Mohamed Abdul Haq	MAS	2057

Good luck to both Nicholas and Haq, hope they can achieve their dreams!