Moulthun Bags IM Norm

The Essent Open ended last night and the Australians completed their ninth round missions on a positive with not a single loss to their scorecards. More importantly, Queenslander Moulthun Ly also secured his second IM norm.

Results were as follows:

Peng, Zhaoqin - Rogers, Ian 0-1
Smerdon, David - Vedder, Richard 1/2
Van Der Elburg, Freddie - Ly, Moulthun 0-1
Weeks, Manuel - Kulago, Alexander 1-0

And final scores for the Australians.

Rogers - 6
Smerdon - 5
Ly - 5
Weeks - 3.5

A very good tournament overall for the Australians especially for Moulthun. This young man looks set to one day join our Olympiad firepower and we can only hope that the national chess body, the Australian Chess Federation, does everything it can to provide much needed assistance. If there was a worthy policy aim of the ACF, then it must be surely be to identify talents like Moulthun and helping them get to the top.

Moulthun's tally of 5 points included wins or draws with experiened masters plus, of course, that very memorable victory over GM Vyacheslav Ikonnikov in the first round.

One of the challenges of blogging a tournament is choosing what game to present. Rogers'win or Moulthun's? The Australian GM's full point from Dutch GM Peng was methodical and the end was nice. Still, I think it best to celebrate the future. Go Moulthun!


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