Diary

[Hans van der Zijden]

Tuesday november 22
If you are tired your mind works in mysterious ways. So often I drove past gasstations with the “Open 24 hours” sign, but this morning for the first time I am thinking why they don’t just put “Open”. Much cheaper, which is good in this financial crisis. They predicted more traffic jams than yesterday, but the only one I see is going in the other direction. So I arrive very early, even before Tournament Director Jan Krabbenbos. His train was delayed.

Stefan is already sitting behind his computer, hopefully programming in some last minute bugs. Pandix has a terrible move in the book that loses a piece. He resigns right away. Hiarcs manages to win a pawn, but it is not enough for a win. Junior does win and is now half a point ahead.

Round 8 has two top pairings and the games live up to their expectations. Again a bad line by Hiarcs. Pandix is out of book already at move 22, but Hiarcs stays in book 13 moves longer. Pandix’ eval steadily increases to 0.70. When Hiarcs finally starts to calculate, it agrees with Pandix. Hiarcs is a pawn down. Pandix keeps improving its score and when it gets two passed pawns the eval rises above 4. The point of no return according to Gyula Horvath. To make things worse junior is clearly ahead against Shredder. It looks like the last game against Junior won’t matter anymore. But then magically Pandix and Junior see no progress anymore and both games miraculously end in a draw. Gyula tried it for 129 moves. His program doesn’t use tablebases and shows a +7 score. But king and queen can’t win from king and pawn when the pawn is on h2 protected by the king. Now Hiarcs only has to beat Junior tomorrow to reach first place. How hard can that be? If Shredder wins also, there will be play offs.

When I am ready to leave I can’t find my glasses. Maybe I left them in the car. No. I go back inside to search some more. I find it. It is under the paper Hiarcs sign. I wonder who did that. I skip the group dinner because I need to rest and there is football on tv. The 0-0 that Ajax plays is still exciting enough to keep me awake, but I miss almost everything from the highlights of the other games.