2010 World Youth Chess Championships

I received the following update from my friends at Southwest Chess Club:

This first part is from Mike Nietman, President of the Wisconsin Chess Federation:

Here is an e-mail I just got from Yingming ‘Will’ Liang. Awonder was paired up to board one and defeated the top seeded player in the section, a Vietnamese FM who is the Asian U8 Champ!

Note that they are using FIDE ratings and in that section especially, there are a lot of unrateds like Awonder. So, it’ll take several rounds to figure out who all the real players are.


Daily updates from the coaches will be on the headlines at www.uschess.org. In addition, the direct website for the event is http://wycc2010.chessdom.com/. Games start at 8 A.M. central time and top boards may be shown on the internet at a link on the USCF’s story page. It doesn’t look like they have all of the pages on the event site working yet but it is just day one.


This summary is from Mr. Liang (Awonder's dad):

I am very delighted to report to you that in the under 8 boys section at the World Youth Chess Championships here in Porto Carras, Greece, our boys played very well in the first round. They came up with a nice result of 3-1/2 out of 4. Praveen Balakrishnan quikly overpowered his opponent and won first. In a long battle, Aravind Kumar defeated a very strong opponent from Russia in style. Rayan Taghizadeh provided us with a hard-fought draw. Awonder had just pulled out an upset victory against the number one seeded player and the only FM in his under 8 boys section. Seeded number 61, Awonder played black with the Sicilian-Najdorf Opening. After 50 some moves, facing losing his Queen or King, his opponent, Anh Khoi Nguyen, the current Asian under 8 champion from Vietnam, saved both of them by running down his own clock.


Let's hope that all of our boys and girls will keep playing real good chess here.