Blog GilaChess

Believe it or not, GilaChess is mentioned in The Star on 29th July 2005, Friday for the first time in 5 years!!. It's a landmark for my website even if it's just the last line in the chess column referring readers to download entry forms for the Malaysian Open and Merdeka Team tourneys. Actually the official site is TCN (http://tcn.sourceforge.net). Anyway, thanks Mr Quah Seng Sun for mentioning my website :).

Received an email from my webhosting company that GilaChess was hacked again. Apparently my-brand new-yet-to-be-announced GilaChess blog was hacked and defaced. On one hand I feel honored that my insignificant blog can get the attention of hackers but I am also worried that my main website http://www.gilachess.com might get hacked again. So I was forced to make an early backup of my website yet again. Anyway, my plans to replace this blog with the new blog has to be postponed. Luckily the webhost people were sharp enough to spot the hacking attempt and promptly locked the blog from further defacement. They immediately sent me an email about it and also instructions on what to do. The new blog was supposed to run on the latest and popularWordPress engine but the hacker found away to compromise this blogging software. Thank heavens the main website is still running fine and no hacking attempt has been detected yet.

KYUEM chess tourney, Sunday - 25/0/2005 Woke up "early" this morning but forgot to charge my handphone and camera batteries. Great! So I won't be GilaChess the reporter but just GilaChess the player :) Then I forgot that I did not save the map and addres ot KYUEM to my thumbdrive (I have no internet connection at home). So I went to the cyber cafe early at 7.30 am, logged into GilaChess.com and copied the map. Left for KYUEM, Lembah Beringin at 8am. I was surprised as it was really far. Took a little over an hour to reach the Kolej Yayasan UEM. UEM stands for United Engineer, Malaysia according to their chess club president. The place was nice. Pleasantly cooling morning air was the first thing that struct me when I got out of my car. As usual the tournament started a little later than expected - 10.30am instead of 10am. I was surprised as I was ranked 11th in the list before the rounds started. That's the highest I'm ever ranked!! Anyway, there were the usual chess kaki's such as: Fairin Zakaria Kamaluddin Yusof Siti Zulaikha Johan Iskandar Saprin Sabri Kamal Ariffin Wahiduddin ...and many more I can't remember off hand. Look out for the full report tomorrow at GilaChess. For now, I can report that Siti won the event. She and Kamaluddin scored 5 points going into the 6th round. They were paired to meet in the final round. Kamaluddin playing Black had an overwhelming position with 2 rooks and 1 bishop and a Queen trained at Siti's poor g2 pawn with the White King behind it's cover. Somehow Siti managed to get all her pieces to defend the g2 pawn. In the end she managed to force a draw by repetition. However her tie break was better than Kamaluddin, so she took first place and Kamaluddin came in second. Third was Fairin Zakaria who has been very consistent in allegro tournaments lately - only losing to Siti in time trouble blunder. Sorry my brain can't recall who took 4th-10th place. But I post the results tomorrow with pictures. Look out for it!! As for me, I finished 11th just as my initial seeding predicted!! That's my best tournament so far this year. Almost getting into top 10 place :) Anyway, since it was getting dark I got out early after the prize giving to to go back to KL. Rushing home, I saw an accident right just 100 meters ahead of me. Luckily there was not serious as it just involved damage to the front and back of 2 cars. I drove home a little slower after that..

During last week's tournament, I talked to a chess player who actually resigned from a job to take part in the coming Malaysian Open. Now that is what I call 'GilaChess'. As for me, I didn't have to do anything as drastic as resigning. Thankfully as I got leave for the whole week of the Malaysian Open (it's 99% confirmed anyway). Wished I could get more leave to play in the Merdeka Team events but that's really asking for too much. Anyway I'm going to miss the team event as it holds fond memory for me last year. Guess you can't have everything ..

This is taken from The Chess Network. Looks like it's going to be a busy August and September for chess players in Malaysia.

Click here to view the Details of the Merdeka Festival

Or visit The Chess Network for more details. I'm taking a whole week off work to be part of the Malaysian Open. It's the 2nd in a hopefully long series to come. The 1st Dato Arthur Tan Malaysian Open (that's the full name of the tourney) was a memorable event for me. I got to play amongst Grandmasters and IMs from all over the country. So even if you are not a chess fanatic like me, do stop by if you are in Mid Valley to take a look at real-life Grandmasters. More on that later in my blog posts. I'm working hard now right not at my chess game but on ways to come out with some good online chess publishing tools so that we can have news about the Malaysian Open as soon as each round ends. With the help of da5thknight (our newest GilaChess member) and Remisaman, I'm sure we can make the site reporting a success. Wish us luck.

On Friday night 8.30pm a hacker replaced one of my heading file in GilaChess. Carelessness on my part for not checking all my files were protected. Anyway I was lucky that was as far as the hacker can go. He/she could only overwrite one file. I already made periodic backups of my website but restoring it took 3 days. Lesson learnt! One good thing that come out of it is GilaChess is now tougher and more security holes are removed. Of course I can't guarantee my website won't be hacked again but it will certainly be much harder for hackers now. This something like a chess game. If you lose a game and the experience is painful, you can often learn more from that lost game that a game you won brilliantly. The pain will etch in your memory and it will be lesson well learnt. I tried imitating the hackers 'trick' on some of the websites I've created for some clients and found the same holes (and then some) there too.

Where were you guys?? I thought there would be a strong support for this charity event. I even overheard a few saying in the previous CAS tournament that it's a good cause and they will enter the tournament but I didn't see you guys here at all. Anyway, only 14 participants took part and almost all (excluding me of course)very strong players. Here are half the names I can remember off-hand. * Siti Zulaikha. * Kamaluddin Yusof. * Saprin Sabri. * Fariz Shafruddin. * Fadli Zakaria. * Farin Zakaria. * Masrin Erowan. * Johan Iskandar. * Francois * Anthony Tan * Soharno Final results :-

MCD Open Results

1     Siti Zulaikha     5   
2     Kamaluddin Y      4.5 
3     Saprin Sabri      4.5 
4     Fairin Z          4   
5     Fariz  S          3.5 
6     Zaidan Zul        3.5 
7 -8  Johan  I          3   
      Masrin  E         3   
9 -10 Francois Bardoul  2.5 
      Andrew Ooi        2.5 
11-12 Fadli Z           2   
      Anthony Tan       2   
13    Suharno           1.5 
14    Mohd Fariq        1   

For me personally, it was a let-down to see so few players participating. Perhaps the RM50 was too high?? Or perhaps, Chess players are not as charitable as I had hoped. I hope that is not true. As I said before, this is one of the rare events where chess players can get to play chess as well do some good for the community. It's a great departure from the usual chase for "cari makan" prize money or personal score to increase your national / FIDE rating. Anyway it was a nice experience for me. I got to see up close how the blind played chess using their special chess boards. As the top 10 players were pretty strong, I was satisfied with my less than 50% score. My opponents included: Round 1 Kamaluddin Yusof ( I lost of course) 2 Suharno (I won) 3 Fadli Zakari (I lost) 4 Fairin Zakaria (I lost) 5 Anthony Tan (I won) 6 FM Johan Iskandar (I DREW !!!) As you can see I met 4 players with ELO 2000+ ratings. It was really a different experience after losing one round and instead of meeting a weaker opponent, you get to meet another strong player next. Pretty stressful! But 2.5 points out of 6 is not too bad considering all the nice opening positions I got. Particularly against Kamaluddin and, Fadli and Johan. I think I had a plus in the opening or some point of the game. I even got a winning position at the end against Kamaluddin but blundered it away with only one minute vs Kamaluddin's 15 minutes. I even drew against Johan Iskandar in the final round. That really made my day! I think I even finished top 10 :) So to those who didn't come, or at least just to pay a visit, you missed a special chess event. (note: I'm selling my MegaBase 8 CD on databases of Malaysian Chess player games as well as 1.96 million game collection - all on one CD. Price - RM10. I'm donating RM8 for every CD sold to the Blind assosciation - contact me via my GilaChess website if you are interested)