Phew, Syuen is finally over. As the organising chairman of the event, there were many times the event appeared in trouble. Potential sponsors pulled out and finally after a long search Tenby came to the rescue. Syuen was firmly behind us all the way. For that, I would like to give them my heartfelt thanks on behalf of PICA. In the final week of the event, JPN issued a directive that all gatherings were to be aborted. As a result, from my feedback, we lost 3 busload of players. So the last few days were spent calling friends personally to invite them to attend.
Still the event was a success, arbiters from JPN came in to help in their own capacity. My heartfelt thanks to them too. We achieved a number of 119, slightly ahead of our other national rated event in Batu Gajah (106). So to date this is the new committee's largest event.
We also received many compliments for a well run event with many asking, when will be our next event in Perak! Kudos to the committee members who helped out despite the H1N1 scare as well as volunteers from St Michael.
In conclusion, out-of-state players outnumbered our local participants, with Penang coming with the largest contingent. So thank you Penang for helping make this tournament a success. KL and Selangor also came in decent numbers. :)
So Perak still has a way to go before we can compete in the National level. Nevertheless the much fewer diehard chess players in Perak still turned up.
But to me, it's an excellent start.
And finally I also want to acknowledge our chess blogging community, many of whom went the extra mile for us. We couldn't have done this without your help. Do check out their sites to see the explosion in chess throughout Malaysia. Their links are at the panel on the right.
Here are the results of the event:
Raymond
