I have never seen so much chess activity in a month!! First we had the Malaysian Open and Chevrolet Open. Then came the Merdeka Team Championship, a short blitz open, and the FIDE World Championship Zonal 3.3 here in Malaysia. GilaChess.com managed to cover all the events. The Malaysian Open was a nightmare as GilaChess.com was under DOS (Denial Of Service) attack. Basically it's just some hacker who turned on some PCs to repeatedly request for webpages from our servers, overwhelming and flooding it to the point other visitors cannot load the website. It went on for the first 3 days of the championship and we could not get out the latest results. Luckily our webhosting company managed to move the website to new servers and stave of the malicious attack. It was indeed memorable to witness the magic of Wang Hao as he effortlessly beat 5 strong GMs and a couple of other IMs to score a fantastic 10/11. Then came the Team championship where many of the GMs stayed back to take part in this yearly event. The Philipinos headed by GM Antonio Rogelio Jr took the first place for the 2nd year in a row. After a few days rest, it was the Zonal 3.3. My favourite player, GM Mark Paragua took part but unlike Wang Hao he didn't win this event outright. He got 7/9 sharing the same points with GM Utut Adianto from Indonesia. Utut won on tie break but it wasn't very important as both have qualified to represent this region in the World Championship cycle. This is Mark's 2nd attempt and I wish him luck. Also notable is WGM Anya Corke decision to take part in the Men's Zonal instead of the Women's Zonal. She started badly with 3 losses in a row. She ended with a more or less respectable 3.5 points. All her 3 wins were against Malaysians, notably - Francis Tan, FM Anas Nazreen and World Police Champion Ismail Ahmad. The Women Zonal was completely dominated by the Viets who took the top 5 places. Unfortunately there was only one qualifying place only in this section. Malaysian's were totally outclassed in the zonals except for a respectable performance by FM Lim Yee Weng who managed to draw games against some strong GMs as well as beat GM Bazar of Mongolia. However for his efforts, it was not enough for another IM norm. My website has never seen so many hits. Eg: I usually get 1 Gigabyte of traffic per month but the last 2 months I was getting 5 Gigabytes per month!! Anyway things are winding down and I can rest again. I have to thank my partners da5thknight as well as remisaman I know must have been dying to be in Kuala Lumpur to witness the tournament first hand but he had to watch the entire event via the internet in Kedah. Also with the strong interest shown by readers in GilaChess, perhaps there will be an Anya Corke fan website. We'll see .... There were lots of things I wanted to do but didn't. Among them were:-

Podcasted interviews and news report Ah, perhaps the next time ... :)