2013 SEA Games chess shame (Part two)

International Chess

Our representatives were drawn from the National squads. For the men it was the top eight finishers from the Malaysian Masters. A blitz selection was held during the Malaysian Open in August this year to determine who will be the representatives in SEA Games International blitz. Read here.

All seems good but lets think a little outside the box. The Malaysian Masters was a standard time control tournament. Then the top eight (men's anyway) played a blitz to determine the top two. (Actually only five competed since IM Mas, Aron Teh and Lim Zhuo Ren were not present).

Let's look at a little analogy. We want to choose two runners to represent in an important 100 metre dash event. Let's hold a long distance run and see who are the top eight runners. Then from these eight put them in a 100 metre race to find our best two runners to represent us. Is this a good way to select? After all, a long distance race is very different from a 100 metre dash.

I finished last in the Malaysian Masters but my blitz is pretty good. Just after the 2011 National Championships I handily won a very strong blitz event attended by most of the participants plus IMs Mas and Mok. In 2012 I qualified from the online World Mind Games qualifier.  In a recent blitz tournament, I finished second to Yeoh Li Tian ahead of Ronnie Lim, our SEA Games blitz representative. Standard chess and blitz chess are different.

2013 SEA Games chess shame (Part one)

I never intended to write this particular piece. Over the past week I was still debating with myself whether I should do so. What made me decide was looking at the final results of Malaysia in chess at the 2013 SEA Games.

What I write here is based on what I understood from talking with people involved. If there are any mistakes, they are fully mine. This will be a long article and I will break it up into two parts as there will be too much to digest in one go.

For full disclosure I must state that I was asked to train with the ASEAN and Traditional Chess team. I also had a two day training with the International Chess women team. Up till three months before the games, I thought I would be competing in the Transfer Chess event (read below for more).

In case anyone tries to spin this post, let me emphasis that this is not written to attack or humiliate any of our representatives. They were vetted and sent by the Malaysian Chess Federation. Personally, I hold MCF responsible for this Games debacle.

Contrary to what some had tried to spin, Malaysia was not last. We were last in the medal tally - two other countries had no medals and they are Singapore and Laos. Therefore we actually finished third last.