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..